


Lost in the Trees

by rednightmare



Category: Kingdom Come: Deliverance (Video Game)
Genre: Animal Abuse, Assassination Attempt(s), Classism, Drama, Drowning, Emotional Roller Coaster, Established Relationship, Extended Canon, Homophobia, M/M, Medieval, Monastery, Oral Sex, Penetrative Sex, Physical Abuse, Poisoning, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Religion, Romantic Friendship, Sexual Content, Sexuality, Starvation, Violence, jailbreak
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-19
Updated: 2019-04-19
Packaged: 2020-01-16 15:19:38
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 22,688
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18524197
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rednightmare/pseuds/rednightmare
Summary: In the monastery, among the monks of St. Benedict, Brother Gregor learns how to live a life of God.Request fill: Henry uses his time in the monastery to reflect on his life/sexuality/environment/relationship with Lord Capon.





	Lost in the Trees

**Author's Note:**

> **This is a request fill!** The prompt was suggested by Tarisaskia on the KCD fanworks Discord. (Which you all should join—ask me how!) I have taken some creative liberties with canonical quests. Thanks for such a thoughtful prompt, T!
> 
>  **HISTORICAL FICTION DISCLAIMER** : Like the video game it's derived from, LOST IN THE TREES is not a work of nonfiction. I've attempted to extend Warhorse's lifelike and believable medieval world, but do be aware that historical details have been altered and/or presumed where hard facts are unavailable, inconsistent with KCD's characterization/narrative, or simply not conducive to good storytelling. Please do not use it as learning material or as a reference text.
> 
>  **CONTENT WARNINGS:** 1.This piece contains the recurring physical/mental abuse of a teenager. I have endeavored to be sensitive and non-exploitative, but please read at your discretion. There are no rape scenes. 2. _Lost in the Trees_ also involves descriptive violence (primarily against animals) and sex, both in passing reference and in scene. The latter occurs between consenting adults and while it’s not blow-by-blow explicit, it is intense; skip the last section of **part ii** if you’d like to avoid it. 3. Finally, obviously, there are SERIOUS SPOILERS for KCD's monastery portion. 
> 
> **HISTORICAL TIDBIT:** It may be helpful to know that Medieval Europe didn’t really conceive of sexuality as categorical—the designations of straightness, gayness, lesbianism, bisexuality, etc. didn’t exist for them in the same way they do for us. While people have always had partner preferences, of course, medieval sex was considered an act, not an identity grouping. So it is important to note—although sodomy was indeed criminalized to varying degrees/across various regions and time periods—the word “sodomite” wasn’t simply medieval slang for a gay man; sodomy included any sexual interaction that could not result in procreation. 
> 
> **READING ORDER:** _Lost in the Trees_ is designed to pair nicely with my [BELOW THE STORM](https://archiveofourown.org/series/1133063) series. It is not an entry, however, and can be read entirely free-standing.

The Sasau Monastery is the loneliest place in the whole world, he thinks. He would rather be lost deep in a dark, unpeopled wood.

 

 

 

**i.**

 

 

 

On his first day in the monastery, Henry doesn’t yet understand what this place is. He is too focused on perfecting his disguise. He does not see the world outside as if he were trapped-in, kept behind this layer of red brick and holy glass.

He stands under soaring ceilings and echoes their chant: _I shall live, and do not disappoint me_

or something.

He loses his name. _Gregor_ , they call him, just like that, and just like that _Henry_ is gone, like yanking a dry leaf from a twig. He tries not to snicker at the thought of being a Greg. He spends his last gasp of freedom writhing in embarrassment over his bad singing and botched Latin, scratching uncomfortably in coarse white robes.

The prior says to him: _Forget your former life._

On his first day in the monastery, he is easily distracted, like a green-eyed kitten listening for mice pups in the kitchen walls. Prior Phineas releases two of them—his most trustworthy charge, and his stupidest new novice—from all daily labors, so that the former can show the latter about. Henry finds it a little odd how much Antonius babbles at him. He talks at Gregor all day, and Gregor listens, the kitten who now watches a closet moth flit anxiously into dark cellar air.

Brother Antonius says: _This is where we hang the wash, and this is the way we store the tinctures, and this is how we fold the books so their pages stay crisp and their spines never bend, and this, and this, and..._

Henry doesn’t mind the jibber-jabber. Antonius is polite and extremely well-educated and has a kind voice—he is handsome, almost indecently so for a monk, and pleasant to listen to. But the man speaks too eagerly, with a desperate edge, as though he feels too keenly the shapes of letters in his mouth. He tells Gregor all about the creaky third dormitory stair and the most comfortable refectory bench and calligraphy practice, about which circators are soft-touches and which must be avoided at all costs, about wheedling extra pancakes on Sundays and where to safely change your robe and which beds are subject to the worst of the winter draft. He tells him about garden tools and old grudges and his favorite books. He tells him about a stinky dog he once had and how the gazebo roof leaks when it rains.

If Henry had known it was the last real conversation he’d have in this place, he would have better savored it. He would have felt his words a little more keenly, too.

On his first day in the monastery, Gregor does not go to dinner. He says he would like a little more time to sit in the quiet and go over his book of rules. Antonius, who is a few years older than him—enough to pretend to be big-brother stern—warns him not to try running away. “ _You’re ours now_ , _Gregor_ , _don’t forget,”_ he finger-waggles, only halfway laughing. Gregor, knowing he has a secret name, laughs easily with him. But Antonius does leave—and then he, _Henry_ , is by himself in a tall, sunlit silence that shiprocks his heart in his chest.

He shuffles awkwardly about the vacant dormitory, stomach growling, looking for clues in cupboards and under pillows and upon the soles of tatty spare shoes. He doesn’t find anything. He does not yet know what he is hunting for.

He does not feel at all like a Gregor. On this first day, it is still only a game.

 

* * *

 

When he was a child, Henry played war in tall grass. His castle stood steeped in sun on the silver hill and his soldiers were sage stems and the carrot flowers. It made no difference if he was its knight or its lord.

When you are a child, courage and fear come fast and easy. Your mouth does not yet know the taste of blood, the smell of ruin. It is a game to imagine the sunlight on houses turning into flame. It is a game, at least, until that sun drifts too far west, stretching the shadow of forest across the old pastures, and the wind in the hawthorns reminds young Henry he is neither a knight nor a lord. It is getting late, and there are wolves in the night. And he is only small.

He is only the blacksmith’s boy.

His childhood castle burns on its dream-hill, he supposes. He runs home without knowing what lives in the curtain beyond the dark linden trees.

 

* * *

 

On his second day in the monastery, Gregor does everything wrong. He oversleeps and is saved only because Antonius doubles back to shake him awake, making them both late to morning prayer. Prior Phineas pities his newness, so says nothing, but shoots both tardy novices strict eyes before breakfast. Gregor is humiliated to be proving such a disappointment so early, even in this false life, wearing this fake name. He eats his flavorless boiled oats silently, trying not to taste or chew.

Phineas does not break his fast with the others. Instead, mealless, he stands over them at the petty refectory pulpit and reads:

**_Let us act in accordance with that saying of the Prophet; "I have said: I will keep my ways, that I offend not with my tongue. I have been watchful over my mouth: I held my peace and humbled myself, and was silent.”_ **

His timing is off. Gregor is late to the fratery, and once there, bungles a simple balm of mint. He leaves it too long on the fire and burns the wax. Provost Nevlas is forgiving, but annoyed, and removes him from the cookpit entirely. Instead, Gregor must pestle wormwood for hours until his fingers and forearms are sore.   

He makes an awful mess of his transcription work. Henry can barely read Latin, and so must copy shapes, not words. Ink and parchment are more expensive than mint and beeswax; Librarian Cyril is not so forgiving as Nevlas. He yells at Gregor in front of everyone and calls him an idiot a dozen ways, demands he stay late to repair his poor work. He sits in the library long after the other brothers have gone, and the dust resettles, and the room grows cold.

There are no secrets to be learned among Ovid and Aquinas. Dinner has been over for an hour before all his misspellings and smudges are fixed. Gregor creeps in under the cover of candle-lit darkness, goes to bed starving, and in the morning, he wakes up late again.

 

ooo

On his third day in the monastery, Gregor is determined to do better. He runs down from the dormitory so as not to miss Lauds, stubbing his toe on the same creaky stairwell Antonius warned him about, slipping into the dawn chant so quietly that hardly anyone notices his absence. He eats his tasteless oat gruel like it is a game of resolve: chew, swallow, chew, swallow. He does not think of anything. He pretends he is a simple, unflappable cow.

The droning of the Rules hypnotizes him as a pink sun rises over Sasau River and sparkles the dark green monastery glass, turning it to beetles’ wings.

Prior Phineas reads:

**_“Come, children, listen to me: I will teach you the fear of the Lord. Run while ye have the light of life, that the shades of death envelop you not.”_ **

Gregor is the first one finished eating (except for crabby old Brother Francis, who has bad teeth and doesn’t take more than two bites unless Brother Cyril makes him). He sits there with his wooden spoon in his empty bowl like a good boy. He does not so much as look at another novice. His are the second set of shoes through the doorway and onto the washed red brick.

Today, Nevlas is ready for Gregor in advance. He tutors his newest novice on herbalism all morning. They separate good plants from bad and the provost writes him a list of common alchemical terms to memorize. He still won’t let him anywhere near the burners, but Gregor doesn’t mind.

Provost Nevlas instructs: “ _Making medicine soon becomes second-nature. Calling up measurements and recipes is difficult for you now, I know. Eventually, you will remember without thinking the weight of the marigold powder in your palm…”_

Cyril slams a tome of letters onto his table and Gregor traces, over-and-over, the swoop and the cross of the _s_.

At Compline hour, before sleep, he says: _O my God, at the end of this day I thank you most heartily for all the graces I have received from you_.

 

* * *

 

There is a place in the wood beyond Rattay where the river floods every spring. Melting snow makes the soil wicked dark and the warm sun peppers it blue with foxgloves. They go there in June to sleep on the ground and pick the little animals that grow like mushrooms from the earth.

Henry never wakes up first. But he tries, at least, to force open his eyes early enough to watch morning scatter the canopy and creep across their camp. The first sharp pink break makes him wince, then softens, reaching through linden leaves toward Hans as he twitches in warm dirt with the last of his sleep, until it lights the young lord’s abused brocade and scuffed bootheels and the delicately shorn hair at the back of his neck, sparking all his reds into gold. He will be awake soon. Very soon—and when he is, he will want to cook and eat and laugh and climb and hunt and kill and kiss and fight and win. But he is not awake yet. So Henry falls back asleep to the waking noise of martins and waxwings, with certainty in his heart and the singe of last night’s venison lingering in his mouth. It is nighttime somewhere else now. He hopes that when he is old, he will go here in his dreams.

 

* * *

 

On his fifth day in the monastery, there is a change. Henry (Gregor) is not used to getting up so early, and his body struggles. Time feels funny and stretched out. They have dense dark rolls instead of oats for breakfast, and that is enough to lift Gregor’s (Henry’s) spirits a little. He thinks about Ma’s cooking. He does his duties same as yesterday and doesn’t say much to anyone. He tastes a memory of warm butter biscuits on the back of his tongue all day.

 

ooo

 

On his seventh day in the monastery, Gregor finally speaks with the rest of his brothers. It is gardening weather, so the novices are excused from morning duties to dig—and though an aspiring monk really isn’t supposed to give himself up to idle chitchat, they all natter like washing girls.

His suspects, such as they are:

Jodok is the worst of the lot. He is ambitious and lacks dignity; instead, he's the sniveling laugh and the plump cheeks and the cold stare of a winter mink. He enjoys miniature powers gathered through kiss-arsery and lorded over his peers. He has a searing hatred for women—for it is a bitch, he swears, that brought him here—but for all his hate, he won’t stop talking about them. It is the kind of talk that makes Henry feel queasy in his whole body. He thinks of Theresa’s dance interrupted by men’s hands in the tavern green, of her face outraged, hair torn, and wishes he could take her to some better place, in some fairer country, at some kinder time.

Siskin is their reformed thief. A famous writer’s least favorite son, he’s black-haired and green-eyed like a proper rake. It’s a childish look, but a devil-child's—quick to smile, quicker to snort—and none of the monks trust him a lick. For all that, Henry doesn’t know much about him but that he steals sausages from the pantry, hates his father, and his loose sandals smack when he runs.

And there is, always, Antonius—steady-hearted, dark-browed, grounding them all like the silence in a chapel just before evening mass.

Lucas won’t talk to Gregor. The others tell him not to take it personally. That is, they explain, his way.

They all-together work in the sunlight, squinting, with dull spades and sweating armpits and nothing to protect them from the cut of each other’s eyes.

“What do you hear about Abbot Peter?” wonders Siskin, kneeling in lavender, his face full of freckles like a fistful of sand.

Jodok is less curious. His pragmatism’s got a sly and boorish edge—perfect for a villain—but ill-suited to a cloister. Their conversation is a poor fit in itself, junior monks all poking at death in the garden of musky healing flowers they’re supposed to help raise.

“Does it matter? John told me he reckons the old abbot’s already kicked it, and Phineas is delaying the news. Poor prior must be a wreck,” Jodok purports, feeling haughty. His forecast is darker (and thereby seems, to him, better) than everyone else’s. Jodok has a contemptible face, but his thinning widow’s peak robs some danger from it. He sinks bare fingers deep down to turn the unplanted soil. “Because he knows his pick of the litter doesn’t have enough votes to win the dead man’s seat.”

Beside Gregor in infant seeds, Antonius’s kind voice is tight as a puffed snake. “Bite your tongue, you gossip.”

“It’s not gossip if I’m not saying whether it’s true or isn’t. Besides, that’s predictable enough, coming from you. Shouldn’t you be off licking a crumb from Nevlas’s bootheel?”

Henry (Gregor) listens and does not. Early sun slips down the central gazebo shingles and splatters like rain, hurting his eyes, which are tendered by sleepiness. One of these men is a horse-butcher, crouching in the wormwood spindles. One of these monks has murdered fillies and boys. He knows this, and yet black mornings and cabbage stews and songful silence have dulled him to the significance of death.

“That is _exactly_ what gossip is,” Antonius insists, flicking a sharp look. His deep-set eyes are the foresty color of brown that makes Henry think of horses. He tries not to think of yearlings rawly hamstrung and shrieking in the warm spring dust. “I bet you made it up.”

Jodok never seems bothered by disdain. He knows that he is safer than his brothers are from the circators’ canes. “What do you say, Gregor? I suppose this stick-in-the-mud turned you into one of the provost’s cronies, too.”

“Now, don’t drag me into it.” Gregor holds up his dirty and helpless palms. “I just got here.”

Jodok seems satisfied enough by the dodge. But Antonius looks unimpressed in the corner of his vision, stabbing a spade into rooty earth. Disappointed—and a little bit less like such a gentle animal, after all.

Siskin—whose question it was to begin with—is sympathetic, at least. He grins, a big smile with crowded teeth, though such easy delight makes him look guilty in the same way a boy with a smuggled box of taffies does. He’s got all the vinegar and the no-good spitfire a noble’s son ought to have, and surrounded by monks in somber colors, Henry wishes he reminded him of Young Lord Capon. But he doesn’t, really. There’s no one anywhere who reminds him of Hans.

“True! What good does recruiting Gregor do us, anyway? You might as well ask a trout fillet about flight. Or a chicken breast about swimming, eh?” Siskin snickers, tucks his fist under an armpit like a hen’s wing, and cluck-clucks.

Gregor (Henry) chuckles stupidly. “Or a pig about bacon.”

“Or a woman about—”

“Will you all shut up?”

They look to the tangled chickweed beyond the gazebo, where sunblond Lucas works in the worst of the daylight, moving as though he is angry at the ground itself, stripping bright roots out of the earth.

“Oh, that’s a fine mood! And a good morning to you, Brother Shrilli—”

“Shut _up_ ,” Lucas orders Jodok—orders all of them—and though he is the youngest and the smallest of them, just newly a man, they-four like little boys clam up. “No one cares what you think. You think you matter a puddle of piss here? You don’t. We‘re all nothings in this house. Just close your fucking mouth and do as you were told.”

The comfrey flowers sway in the care of bees. They stop their talking, and dig.

 

ooo

 

On the tenth day, he wakes up on time.

 

ooo

 

On his twelfth day in the monastery, Gregor startles awake in discomfort that feels like his whole body is gamey meat clutching stringily to a dogbone, with a stiff back and stiff cock and stiff shoulders. He longs for his straw-stuffed mattress in the bailey room. He pines over the beds in Castle Pirkstein, so comfortable by comparison they make him ache. He misses sleeping in cold damp grass, under beech trees, grumbling about Hans flailing in dream-chase and hitting his ribs with an unruly knee.

There is a surprising amount of what Henry cheekily calls _literature_ written on this particular monastic challenge, about cold water and godliness and self-injury and other suggestions of varying insanity. But the monks don’t teach you how not to dream. Sometimes it is Theresa in the hayloft; others, it is Lord Capon on his lap in hot water. These days, his skull is as empty as a tin drum that has been rapped on too hard. The impact of feeling still stuns him, rattles his sides. He tries not to think overmuch about anything that makes him feel any way at all.

He has nowhere to relieve himself, but the problem is solved soon-enough anyway when John catches him late to Lauds and instead of waggling a finger, belts Gregor right between two ribs with the blunt pommel of his notorious crop, shocking him into obedience and opprobria. He is too stunned to even think about anger. He grows a spotty yellow bruise there that hurts if he breathes too deep.

It stings him all morning as the prior chants: _Sicut erat in principio, et nunc, et semper_

On this twelfth day, after much patience, Nevlas has given up on Gregor cooking poultices. He sends him instead into the garden to gather herbs under a pattering gray sky. Here, the quiet is laced with bugwings and rustling lavender, not singing and scribbling. As his hair drips, Henry remembers his real name, and he’s thankful. He closes his eyes and imagines himself by the Rattay river, deep in the woods.

 

* * *

 

 _You’re trembling like a churchmouse, blacksmith,_ Hans laughs at him, brilliant and golden under a cluster of skinny young pines. He laughs-again at the exhausted shrill Henry looses when the warm hand steadying his belly is replaced with a cheeky-cold lick—over softening sex, up pale hairs, into an unsuspecting navel. And then the young lord laughs once more—as he knee-shuffles forward in the red dirt road, beneath the little tooth of Scotch firs on the high bend towards Ledetchko, toward the flat rock’s edge upon which Hal sits—to wipe his sore mouth on a corner of soldier’s tunic. Offended fingers snatch yellow fabric away.

 _“Were you raised in a God-damned stable?”_ Henry scolds, squirming away up his little ledge as much as he can with snarled hose husked down around his calves, getting pine needles stuck on his rear. Pebbles sneezes loudly in the abandoned old rye farm just yonder, where they’ve left their horses to eat white grapes from overgrown gardens; in the distance, hounds usher sheep toward home. _“Using me like a fucking napkin? Go on!_ Y _ou’re disgusting!”_

 _“Me? It’s_ your _situation I’m left with here, lad.”_

_“Shut your nasty mouth!”_

_“Well, I’m trying.”_

_Just be quiet,_ Hal snaps, red as a berry, shoving him away with a boot to the chest that makes Hans’s foxgrin break into hilarity on the grass. Its messy happiness competes with Henry’s indignation and the sparrows in the treetops and the first summer fireflies and the sounds of nightingales, guarding their green-black eggs. None of it is any match for Hans Capon. _Leave me alone, you idiot!_

A moment ago, Henry couldn’t stand to watch him work. A peek between lashes, a squint at a fine knuckle on his knee, the apple of a swallowing throat—unthinkable treasures stolen and squirreled away for some sadder, lonelier sunset. _Fuck_ , he’d cussed, embarrassingly, shutting his eyes tight at the modest gurgle of Hans’s choke between his legs, _I’m going to die!_ But now the work is over and his whole body feels like wet linen. And since he didn’t, after all, die—and though it’s only a bit less an embarrassment of riches—looking is all he can seem to do.

The fever-dream before him relents, and wipes his mouth on the back of his hand. And he asks with unexpected tenderness, “ _What are you so worried about, you darling hayseed? Are you that shy of some open air?”_

Hans looks pretty and unspeakable still kneeling there on red road, among thin trees, heavy-lidded and bright below the breathy purple clouds that come just before sunset. The watery pinks of late evening turn his hair wine-colored and his gray eyes into black pearl, and there is bricky dust on his fine brocade, and there are crickets trilling their legs off in the grass, and there are pinecones scattered around them. And even though the earliest stars are already threatening to make them awfully, dangerously late back to the city, Henry has to force himself to look away. He feels like there is an open hole between his lungs and that he is whistling all-inside with cool almost-night air. The sky seems to go on forever, bleeding. His hands still shake as he tries to tie his hose. _Dry it off first, at least, you blockhead. Do you really think anyone will find you out here?_

_Do you think God is looking for you in the trees?_

* * *

 

If you are lost in a wood, Henry decides on the eighteenth day, planting his sore knees on hot cobblestone to clip thyme, you must at least know that you are really and properly alone. There is nothing denied to you. You are merely in the absence of things.

When you are wholly alone, as you are when you are lost in a wilderness, there is no godly voice to dictate what you might do or where you will go. This is what most scares people, he suspects. There is terror in such freedom. Nothing and no one can spare you from yourself—but this means they cannot stop you from you, either. Or from anything you might see and touch and know. Or from anywhere you might stay or wander. Or from anyone you might decide to be. When you are that alone, you can learn how to keep yourself company. You can, then, talk to the animals, and befriend the trees.

A cloister is different. Here, in these soaring corridors and among uncountable books, you are never purely alone. On the contrary: There are people everywhere, eyes everywhere, whispering everywhere, but none of it is yours and none of it is for you. You are not lost, so you cannot one day be found. There is always some ideal you not following well enough, some lesson you are not learning. There are no trees to tell all about who you are.

Prior Phineas stands daily in the morning dark, lighting candles while everyone prays, and he sings: _Suscipe me, Domine, secundum eloquium tuum et vivam._

 

* * *

 

 _And—what will happen, do you think, if He finds us? Will I be summarily struck?_ Hans dares, lunging up from the Ledetchko road to kiss Hal on the lips before he can even remember what’s just happened, then once more again before he can stick out his tongue and make a disgusted face. His imposes a knee on either side of the blacksmith’s thighs, pulling at his own laces, and Henry forgets completely even the trespass of his own taste. _Cast down from my lofty heights by a bolt of divine lightning? Is that Vicar Hasenburg, hiding in the bushes? Does the Lord Almighty picking prymerose in the Elysian Fields really preoccupy Himself so much with every twitch of your cock?_

 

* * *

 

Henry grows lonely. He is too new to leave the cloister, even for a simple errand, and Gregor has made a poor impression upon his cohorts. He sees the others rarely. Circator John’s attention has turned Jodok too proud to fraternize with his own cohort; Siskin, Lord have mercy, is always falling asleep when he ought to be working; and Lucas doesn’t like him. He feels he has no one who cares who he is.

There are people outside, he knows, who will think of him, who are aware of his absence when he is not around. If one day he should go out into the world and not return—if he should be killed or captured or something, or left somewhere he cannot get back from—Theresa will pace her riverwalk and fret. Janek and Jaroslav will ask after him at the castle, and be persistent about it, as much as they dare. Sir Radzig, even, will wonder, and Hans is certain to be crushed. He is careful not to die.

Prior Phineas after Vespers opens his book as they eat in silence and reads:

**_Not to retain guile in one’s heart._ **

**_Not to make a false peace._ **

**_Not to love much or excessive laughter._ **

**_To avoid elation._ **

**_To know for certain that God sees one everywhere._ **

**_And never to despair of the mercy of God._ **

He misses talking the most, he thinks—the sort of cheap words you trade in without really knowing you are doing it, between unexciting places and to people you see everyday. This talking does not exist inside the monastery. There are days when the only voice Henry hears is the haunt of the dawn and dusk chant, rising and falling like waves in the night. There are other days when a simple _thank you, brother_ fills him with relief. There are days he fears he has ceased to exist and there are days he feels as though the eyes of tiny, malformed angels are peering through bone and flesh to witness the worst and evilest of his thoughts.

No one speaks to the novices. If they can help it, of course. The superior monks are preoccupied with their intrigues and arguments; the inferior ones are not interested. Henry feels like a mouse with no hole to hide himself in. Silence threatens the shadowy stairwells and makes light-washed hallways feel flooded with murky water. There is nowhere to _be_. By the twentieth day, he would give near anything to walk outside under the market sun, beyond these walls, and talk to people. He misses his morning chats with the old madam baker in Rattay more than he misses milk and honey with breakfast. The exaltations of the choir balm his heart with a dark and terrifying peace.

But across the vast scriptorium tables, among the skritching of quills and tapping of ink, Antonius smuggles him tiny looks—an unmonkly hop of the eyebrows, a commiserating grimace—a little wave that feels much like rebellion. This, he’s sure, is the only thing that saves him. He thinks he might otherwise run into the Elysian courtyard and stand among the daisy flowers and scream.

 

* * *

 

 _Or are you worried for my pissing Estate? Oh, no; has old Hanush got to you, too? Are you—then let it_ get _dark, you fucking melon! what do I care what the sky does? let the sun explode—are you really fretting about the Social Rule? Do you sit in your sad rotting room and bite your nails off at the thought of a gaggle of pesky rebels, come to slap me out of my big chair? Chop off my balls? Throw me in the river? Burn my castles to charcoal? Break the Order of Things? Will it be the end of the world if they do?_

_Will it be anarchy, Jesus Christ?_

 

* * *

 

Gregor learns enough Latin to write: _Opus Dei, oboedientia, opprobria—in the service of God, obedience, and endurance of all discomfort_

As he sits in the library on his twenty-first day, copying Roman wisdom he cannot understand, Henry thinks of Johanka in the sick ward. Even now, he realizes with a burst of delight in his chest, she’ll be working below—shaking up tonics and pestling dandelions and heating bandages and rinsing her pliers. Later, before dinner, he sneaks into the stairwell aside the study and sits by the window for an hour, just on the hope he might catch one glimpse of her grumpily shaking out a bloody sheet to hang dry. She doesn’t, but the hope remains lodged there for another day. It is probably for the best. He thinks the actual sight of someone who knows him would catapult his heart straight into the moon and burst it into red powder.

On his twenty-second day, he already feels like most of himself has left him. On his twenty-third, he feels he has been here a year.

Brothers, all, they stand lost in blacks-and-whites among one another, their hands folded and their eyes cast down, to echo the prior’s call: _and do not let me be confounded in my hope_

Poets say there is great loneliness among people who do not know you. He thinks of the young lord in Rattay, first as a man and before that as a child, and wonders if he understands any better now. There are times Hans looks at him with such twitchy and pathetic love he seems less like a lord and less like a man and more like a boy who knows his father and mother do not care for him. It's too sharp, too keen, like a cinder trapped under glass for too long, as if some desperate thing in his lung has gone afire and scored the insides of the young lord’s heart. He looks like a starving fox dogs have chased under a rock. He knows there is nowhere, really, for him to go. 

 

* * *

 

 _God save me, you’re so stupid, Hal! Come here—come_ here _—don't you know I adore you?_

 

* * *

 

On his twenty-fifth day in the cloister, Henry is so blisteringly lonely, he wakes up early to weep into his blanket during the darkest hour of morning before prayer. Lucas, who always rises well before the others, slips shoes-on and goes elsewhere, annoyed by his crying. He is too sad to feel embarrassed yet. Embarrassment will come later, at dinner, when Henry lies to Brother Nevlas that a bellyache kept him from Lauds. Lucas pauses mid-bite to fix a sharp eye over bowls of black mushroom soup. As Nevlas promises to teach Gregor a draft recipe that will settle any sour stomach, his brother-novice shoves the spoon into his mouth and obviously rolls his eyes.

They sleep. They wake. They work. All over again.

You might suppose that, in order to be a monk, a man must first possess a very particular sort of personality—that he must be infinitely patient, unfathomably wise, placid as a curly gray ewe and imperturbable, too. Henry knows now that is untrue. Some of these monks are meat-eating and cruel. Some are selfish and sadistic, especially the circators, possessed both by indolent joy and a snap-and-crackle fury beyond his ability to predict. Others are gentle as grandfathers. Others still, like brilliant Nevlas, are livid with their belief in science, radical with the righteousness of their youth. Some are poets, some mathematicians. Some of these brothers are evil and menacing old letches you wouldn’t want to catch you alone after supper. There are no children here now, but Henry is terrified by the thought of them, of small shadows scattering across red paver like tiny fishes, of rabbits in the hallways with Brother John’s horse crop and Stibor’s low hands. He feels lucky not to be as handsome as Antonius. He does not have the gravity Antonius does—he cannot stand firm on his scruples or in his body like Antonius does—he owns neither the deep-dark animal stare nor the belltower voice that he has seen inspire second thoughts and godly fear in even Brother John.

He tries not to remember too much of who he was. He is Gregor, Brother Gregor, Gregor-who-was-Karl, Karl-who-was-bad, Gregor-who-is-better, and no one else. He cannot look for the rest of it. He wakes, he eats, he prays.

 

* * *

 

_Don’t you love me, Henry? You do, don’t you? Don’t you._

 

* * *

 

 _"Who were you,”_ Gregor asks his brothers each, in turn, when he can. _“Before this?”_

Jodok was a little brother. Siskin stole the family silver. Lucas won’t talk to him.

In the kitchen, in the middle of dinner chores, Antonius—whom the real monks trust enough to cook for them—pulls the skin off a chicken leg, and sighs. He lays down his peeling knife just long enough to look Biblical. He pours Gregor the littlest sip of pink Padua wine, the good stuff. He watches him drink it, savoring the minuscule sin, and with the face of a merchant’s favorite son and the clarity of an ancient witch he says: _Old lives aren’t real. You’re a new person every day, every second. Everything yesterday is a lie._

* * *

 

It is darkness now. They have waited too long to go home, and the sun has left them alone.

As they walk one-and-two up the road toward the river, castle braziers blinking softly on the bluffs above them, led horses laden with a shot red buck and a roe, trying to retrace on-foot their steps in the night, Henry no longer fears gods. Instead, he worries about robbers and snakes and wild dogs. He scolds His Lordship for foolishness. He wishes he’d brought a torch. He grumbles that they oughtn’t have been so thick and so daring about time.

And so, seeing him fret over danger that cannot be predicted and nature that cannot be tamed, Hans grabs his hand with hot fingers and does him a mischief—he throws a toothy houndhowl across the black fields that knocks a curse out of Henry and scares him shitless.

 _Jesus Christ!_ Hal shrieks, and clamors ineptly for his sword, and kicks hard at Hans’s shin when he realizes it is only a mean little game. _Are you stupid, you foaming git!_ he cries, embarrassed, as the annoyed horses grunt and tail-flick behind them. _Don't you know any better, you fucking child? I might've cut your belly open! Then you wouldn't be tittering like the village idiot, would you!_ Hans is a few months his senior, but it doesn't feel that way. It feels like the old nonsense he used to play in the silver fields, before he knew enough about fire to see it catching everywhere. It feels like _—_ _Complete loonery! Are you trying to get a fist in the teeth! Harassing people! I ought to tan your whole arse, you savage!_ The kicked young lord hops on one foot and laughs and laughs. Then he goads him to join in to this savage play until the blacksmith, unused to yelling, breaks a sheepish and weak-throated scream of his own into the lineless darkness beyond.

Nothing, thank God, answers. There is only the echo and the sound of their footsteps on the unpeopled ground.

 _Craziness_ , Henry coughs, blushing, frightened.

 _Nonsense_ , Hans corrects him, and there is not enough moonlight in the world to make what he says look anything like truth. He smiles in the darkness even though no one can see it. _Now we are among friends,_ he says. _Now,_ he says. _Now—_

 

Holy men wake up in the dark. In the anesthesia of sleep denied to them, Antonius opens his mouth with unusual passion and sings: _in_ _saecula saeculorum, forever and ever_

 

Hans says: _Now the wolves all know our names._

 

**ii.**

 

 

 

When he was a child, Henry grew afraid of tall trees. Johanka told him a wild story about lightning, and since, the blacksmith’s boy would burst out his door whenever black clouds grumbled low over the barley fields, trembling in the shadow of Mother’s linden, wondering if God would cast it down.

 _“Don’t be a damn fool, boy,”_ Da would grunt behind him, appearing in a flash of white sky, irritated by his foolish hovering and the chill he’d let in. _“That tree’s been standing since well before my own father lived, and it’ll be standing when your brats are in the ground, too. And nobody spent a lick of that time_ peering _at it.”_

 _But—_ He couldn’t speak with cold droplets on his face and that thunderous beast out-beyond.

_“But-nothing. Now get in there and help your mother with supper. Better to be crushed in the kitchen than out on the porch.”_

And, as the fat drops of rain rattled leaves high above him, his mouth agape and eyes skyward, Henry let Father tow him arm-first inside.

 _“What would you do if it fell on us, anyway?”_ Da asked him, dropping the little arm as Hal’s shoes tracked wet on the floor. He did not worry about hailstones or lightning-fire. He walked toward the stove and did not look back except to ensure their front door was still shut.

He asked:

_Would you try to stop the heavens with your own two hands?_

 

* * *

 

On his thirty-seventh day in the monastery, he is dreamless. He has lost weight and is losing hunger. He does not want to think about the woods in here, anymore.

On this thirty-seventh day, when Gregor eats and prays and walks and sleeps as though he has no name, there is a problem in the kitchens. Rats are found nesting beneath a shelf of grain— _big_ rats, Brother Cellarius swears, _mean and rabid forest rats_ —and they’ve scattered. Jodok has been sent by Circator John to slay them during Lauds. But he, of course, orders Gregor and Siskin up from their sleep early to bloody the floors in his stead.

A junior novice ought not complain about work. They-two do, however, carp about Jodok all the way to the basement, where escaped rodents and spilled cereal await them. They carp about Lucas, too, who often cannot be found to help them at such chores.

“I’m only pointing out—” Siskin does, when they step into a violet predawn smog to fetch rat-killing tools from the garden shed. The doors creak when yanked open. Gregor pulls a pitchfork and rests it ‘gainst his shoulder, a reassuring weight, reminding him of running spear drills in Rattay courtyard under fine spring rain. “—that it’s _convenient_ , is all. Lucas here-and-there. Where the fuck was he last week when you were on your hands-and-knees mopping Francis’s spit-up? Or when Antonius and I had to climb out on the rafters and polish chandeliers all day? Fuck, I hate that job. And it’s always me. Never him.”

“Ah, he’s probably curried favors. Nevlas told me Abbot Peter’s fond of him. Bet he fancies himself the next provost or something equally stirring.”

“ _Provost_ Lucas?” Siskin kicks the shed shut and they step back inside, rough robes damp with fog, following the guttering candle-trail with humble weapons held casually. No one is awake yet, but their voices hush immediately, by order of the divine, to a whisper in these echoing halls—as though angels might be summoned fire-and-sword from white paint by a sound. “Jesus, Greg—don’t talk so far in the future. I’m struggling to imagine how I’ll make it through this week.”

“God, tell me about it. I’m actually thankful that goblin rolled me out of bed to smash rats with you. I haven’t had a sane conversation in…” The pitchfork-made-polearm feels disturbingly comfortable—so much so, Gregor hopes it doesn’t give Henry away. “I don’t know how long, truth be told.”

“I know! I could kiss you. Yours isn’t the easiest mug to kiss, either.”

“Oh, be still my heart. Just what every flowering village girl wants to hear.”

Siskin giddy-laughs into his free hand, and though it’s a jest, Gregor feels he might plant one right on top of that head. New lines of skull and vein are flexing out over his temples, carving alarming maturity around a face so full of freckles; he must have snipped it. Or had it snipped for him. Shagginess overruns his own ears, too, and suddenly Henry quails with fear under Gregor’s skin. Ma’s the only one who’d ever cut his hair.

Hans has since bullied him to let Zdena at the bathhouse do it—guarantees the blacksmith’s boy that she will shear him handsomer and better-bred; steals his hand and makes him rub his softer, redder hair as though Henry’s never touched it otherwise; brags, _don’t you want yours done like mine?_   But Henry’s only asked Theresa, no one else. Because she doesn’t change things. He worries suddenly and fiercely that these monks will shave him too short, too fast, until a scattering of hay-brown tendrils crowd like shucked fishscale around his feet.

“Do you want to do something fun after?” Siskin dares him, the look in his eye pitching dangerously from happiness to mad desire. In this flame-dark, he looks like a mutt that hasn’t been fed in days. Gregor is almost frightened. He cannot control hope, not now—he does not want this madness to swallow them and throw their ash upon the chapel floor. “I say we brain those little bastards quick, and while the others are at Lauds, you and I go for a foray.”

“A _foray_? Have you fucking lost it?”

“Listen, Greg. I know you’re no scholar, but the best thing about this place is the books. Not the stuff in the scriptorium, either—the reading they keep under lock-and-key. I’ll show you; you wouldn’t believe the physik and hocus-pocus they’ve got in here. I’ve been poking around when the others think I’m on my nightly shitter. John must figure my guts are rotting out.”

“I don’t know, Siskin. Stibor whacked me one in the knee a week ago—‘excessive haste,’ it was—and I still feel it. I think John’s cracked my God-damned rib. Makes you wonder that maybe Lucas has got the right idea.”

“Can you imagine, though? Just for a lark: _Provost Lucas_.” He snickers. “The boy’s a misanthrope. I’ve never met someone who hated me so much and I’ve said maybe fifteen words to him.”

“Funny, that. I halfway hope it’s fate, though—if only so Jodok ends up eating his damn hood.”

“Boy, I’d like to spare the rats and take the business end of this thing to that weasel,” Siskin dreams, flexing thin fingers around the wooden shovel, so hungry that Gregor is not sure whether he means Jodok or Lucas or his own famous author-knight of a father. “I tell you. I’d like to teach him a godly lesson or three—”

They open the heavy kitchen door to find Antonius there, moon-faced, backed into the beginnings of breakfast with a butcher’s knife in his hand.

 _I couldn’t,_ he breathes, swearing it beyond them, straight-to-God—and the joke Gregor is making disintegrates on his tongue when he recognizes the black look behind Antonius’s eye.

“Too soft to mash a rat, are you, brother? Well, the cavalry’s here,” Siskin jokes instead, giving his shovel a threatening shake, rolling up his sleeves like a circus showman. He brushes past Gregor without a thought, not understanding. “Stand aside, peasants—wouldn’t want to get innards on your shoes.”

 _I saw them,_ Antonius tells Gregor. _Horrible things,_ he says, and in those cavernous eyes, little blue horses danse macabre, bending their knees and their necks in unnatural ways; and torn bellies spell prophecy in the courtyard, stomach stones tumbling like dice; the pond reeds clot with a pale mare’s blood. Henry looks back and in his own face, Skalitz still smolders on the silver hill.

He says, _I was going to—I was. But I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t bear it._

He says, _I thought I had it in me. I know that this has to be done._

Later, when the cellar floor foams with hot ratblood, and the trampled corpses are bagged then tossed out the toilet with shit and old food, Henry finds Antonius alone on the night stairs. He stops him midway up and, holding his shoulders tight, their eyes black as crystal, whispers: _My name isn’t Gregor._

And Antonius, when Henry has told him a broken shard of the truth—not all of it but enough of it—enough to make the night feel murderous and alive above the medicine flowers—leans in close. He looks up at him carefully. He looks as one does when his mouth is swollen with so many secrets and so many knowledges, a tip would make them bleed out through the nose, the teeth, the eyes.

 _Take Lucas_ , he says, certain. Antonius tells him that only a guilty man lives like he’s died a long time ago.

* * *

 

There is a place in the bluffs of Rattay where the trees are candlewick thin and fast-burning and full of pine needles. They go here in autumn to eat roasted duck on the cliff’s edge and to see everything.

 _The whole God-affright world,_ Hans declares, sitting cross-legged on a sunbaked rock to finish his lunch, swinging an arm irrelevantly toward the city where it slumps uphill a sprawl of pretty farmland. He bites and spits a strip of charred skin over the side. _Or such as it is, for me._

Tomorrow-early, Henry will pack up his things and leave to winter in the Merhojed Camp, where he will learn whatever it is Sir Radzig wants to know. Tomorrow, God-knows-when, Lord Capon will return to the court from his hunt. Today, though, they have nothing to do except scare birds and hide from Captain Bernard and enjoy the not-yet-cold breeze under eggwhite clouds. Pirkstein looks tidy and new on its hill below the old castle as the red apple trees start dropping their fruit. Henry imagines Rattay five-hundred years ago, when it was only a fleet of spotted deer and a circle of stones.

Hans pokes him in the back with the end of his bow. He says: _“Do you think we’re all as doomed as they say, blacksmith? You think the Ginger Fox will ride down the river and burn my city to the ground, send us all straight to Hell?”_

_“I don’t know about that, sir. I’ve got forge-hands anyway. Wouldn’t feel the hellflames. We'd all be sliding into inferno and I’d just keep pounding away at the anvil, completely unawares.”_

_“Hah! Mitten-hands and a block for a head."_

_"And a pit for a stomach."_

_"And a worm for a cock!"_ Hans chokes, laughing spittily, as Henry frowns and punches at the nearest part of the young lord he can reach. A fist pops him just outside the knee and makes him _ouch_ and hiss and grin.

 _"And what about me?”_ he wants to know, still snickering at his own stupid joke, rubbing the trifle of bruise. Hans casts his bow onto the dry dirt, counting their final few arrows as Henry finishes the last of the almost-stale bread. The sun’s at its bluest and highest height, but it will begin to sink now. They will leave before long or be left walking at night. _“Will I burn to a crisp in my castle while you toast radishes?”_

_“Ah, the Devil gave your soul up ages ago. Waterlogged. Soaked through like a sponge. Couldn’t catch a flame.”_

_“Is that so? To think!: Lord Ješek's godless little shit escapes the pyre." _Hans’s false-worry is broken up by his grin _. “What will we tell the worthless priest? The promise of my arse skewered on a demon's pike is the only thing that's sustained him all these years. Poor shaveling's going to be depressed.”_

_“Depressed about what really happens when a wine-sloshed lord dies?”_

_Or about what happens after,_ he wonders, and without quite finishing, throws his bird’s leg to the woods. _One way or another. After everything's gone all to Hell._

* * *

 

On the fortieth day, Lucas reappears. There is no fanfare or explanation; he is simply at the long table one morning, brooding over soupy pear porridge and raw carrots. He is not chastised by the prior. His dog haunches and hateful look say nothing they have not said before.

Gregor doesn’t bother trying to hello. Henry is so certain this is his man—that this blond-headed, glass-eyed, bile-humored boy is the horse-killer, the hamstring-cutter, the throat-slitter—he has to avoid Lucas’s face for fear his own keenness will give everything up. He feels like a sheepdog with his nostrils and brain spinning-drunk on wolf. He does not even eat his breakfast. Antonius slips from the kitchens to bring Brother Francis his overcooked mash of red lentils, and he watches this strange not-Gregor fearfully from his place down the sunlit row.

An assassin cannot act without proof, of course. There is nothing unusual about Lucas’s belongings—no incriminating botched calligraphy, no crude knife stitched into the underside of his pillow. He wakes up before everyone else without help. He receives compliments from Brother Cyril he cringes away from like a head-shy goat. He seems a perfect monk, _except_.

At dinner, Antonius smuggles Gregor a fresh barley roll with a pat of rich butter like egg yolk inside.

 _I spoke rashly,_ he confesses, mare-eyed, worried, his heart afraid, the blood of smashed rats backsliding up his throat. He presses the biscuit into Gregor’s hand and holds it there like a relic. He begs. _Don’t hurt him. Maybe I’m wrong._

 

ooo

 

On the fortieth night, Gregor takes Siskin up on his offer. They wait until dark (until Siskin’s groaned convincingly enough to skirt off on the pretense of commencing his horrible night shits), and once the whole dormitory is gently snoring, Gregor shimmies out of his bedroll to slip downstairs, too. The holy red tiles freeze the bare planes of his feet every step. When he arrives at the library, Siskin grins up from behind a single candle, framed by a black book full of curses.

But Gregor isn’t interested in grimoires and potions from the East. He arm-twists Siskin into picking the lock on the abbot’s study door, after which even a silver thief loses his nerve, leaving Henry to riffle through Peter’s black desk alone.

It is cold and silken in the sick monk’s reading room. By the here-there light of Siskin’s struggling candle, Gregor finds the pedagogical notes Phineas has upkept for him, and as wax drips he reads—

 

_GREGOR, heretofore known as Karl_

_—is not to stay in the cloister all his life, though for discipline’s sake, is not to know it. He is here to learn better behavior, for which his noble father donated a handsome sum, and upon whose discretion he is to be later released—_

 

—and reading so, Henry nearly weeps, shivering with relief and with the rage of deception, with righteous fury at such a cruel and pitiless plot, before remembering he is neither Gregor nor Karl but the blacksmith’s boy from Silver Skalitz and none of this is real. Head whirling with fierceness that doesn’t belong to him, heart scurrying rodentlike up toward the bottom of his tongue, he reads—

 

_ANTONIUS, heretofore known as Dmitrei_

_—an exemplary worker of calm disposition, and has emerged as a natural leader among his peers, though prays less than he ought—_

_SISKIN, heretofore known as Smil the Younger of Pardubice_

_—thoroughly unsuited for cloistered life. To correct his unruly temperament and the many other deficiencies imparted by a pampered upbringing, he must be spared no discipline—_

_JODOK, heretofore known as Wilk_

_—perfect adherence to the Rule and an obedient personality, barring his past villainy against the female sex, for which he has been interred here as punishment—_

_LUCAS, heretofore known as Canute_

_—excellently suited for monkhood, exempting the perverse nature for which his humiliated family had him removed to this place. He ought be watched carefully around the younger brothers to prevent his sinful inclination from manifesting itself or, God forbid, corrupting the others—_

 

He closes the book and tucks it away.

Antonius, in the shock after violence, tells him: _A guilty man lives like he wants to get living over with as soon as he can._

 

ooo

 

On the forty-first day, ragged from last night’s escapade and confounded by all he does and does not know, Gregor skips breakfast to wash his face and body in the privacy of an empty lavatorium. As he re-enters the day-drenched main hall, now still and quiet in the wake of the brothers’ eating, accompanied only by dust wafts in cool air, there—not where either of them ought to be—is Lucas.

And, sharp-toothed with suspicion, Henry nearly confronts him in the middle of the morning. He nearly pounces knuckles in the back of that perpetually wrinkled habit and hurls him for the wall, smacking head-into-stone, ending this farce. He nearly calls him colt-killer, baby-bleeder. But he doesn’t do or say any of that, because before Gregor can slip from the shadowy vestibule to enact wrath with his washed hands and before Henry can decide what should happen, it isn’t just Lucas there any more.

John steps out of the alcove, and he sinks both fists into the rough creased cloth behind Lucas’s neck.

He does not so much stumble backward as stop while the rest of life keeps going. Henry feels his throat constrict with the unreality of watching another man’s hands do as his temper-dream bid; his heels are sutured to the floor. With even a hair’s-width of fear enflaming that dispassionate face, Lucas doesn’t look like someone who could hamstring horses anymore; he looks, hurled out of shadow, his age, and he is so much younger than the rest of them, easily seven or eight years younger than Henry; he is at most five-and-a-dozen summers old. It is with this face he turns to the circator—whom Gregor has never seen grab someone like that; strike, yes, but not grab—and mumbles something terse Henry can’t make out. Then he turns away, and tries to go.

John spins him around and with his birch crop, whips Lucas to the brow so hard his whole face splits open, and he falls hands-and-knees to the ground.

The snap of oiled wood sounds lordly and final. Lucas, bleeding into his fair hair, feels for the eyeball with his fingers, unable in the shock of castigation to know it is still there any other way.

John doesn’t say anything. He spits on the back of Lucas’s habit and polishes the switch in his sleeve. But later, at Vespers, he will read from the pulpit with particular malice:  **  
**

**_For if it is with ill-will the disciple obeys, if even he murmur in his heart and not only by actual word of mouth, though he fulfill the command, yet will he not now be accepted as obedient by God._ **

Lucas waits until he is alone in the hall to stand up. He is bone-yellow, and as John’s footsteps tip-tap away, the boy covers his split eyebrow with one hand, about-faces. He wipes his brother’s phlegm off his collar with bare fingers and a sneer. And when he walks slowly back to the refectory—not running, not rushing, but stern and measured steps—Lucas glares at Gregor’s blank and gawping face though he wishes it would disappear from the world.

They go to sleep early. Prior Phineas at breakfast reads: _  
_

**_Death and life are in the power of the tongue._ **

 

* * *

 

Tell me a story, Hans needles. _About you._

_“What about me?”_

_“About you riding off into the wilds like a little crusader and digging up a den of bandits, obviously. You, stomping out a pack of foreign raiders. Slaying tyrants, saving damsels, righting wrongs, fucking lusty three-titted maidens. The usual bullshit that makes for good stories.”_

_“Oh, is that what I get up to? I’m afraid reality is going to leave you a mite disappointed, sir.”_

_“Who said I have any interest in reality, you pecking hen? You’re talking about history—I'm talking about stories. What good are stories if they’re not about how it should have been?”_

_“And how should it have been, sir?”_

_“I’ll tell you. It wouldn’t have been in fucking Rattay, that’s for certain. Land of pig-ignorant, dead-eyed bumpkins with their churches and their dog shit. And I’d not be such a piss-poor drunkard, you can believe that! I’d have been a Good and Proper Lord—serious as the Pope, God save me, may I live a hundred years.”_

_“Well, you’re already stretching the bounds of believability. If you’re a good lord, where does that leave me?”_

_“You—you’d still be a blacksmith. But you’d have won something better in life than a pokey old road horse and a dead man’s sword. A peasant-turned-knight should get what he deserves, shouldn’t he. Not a bad lord’s boredom and a rotted bailey in a moldering keep. In fact, we never met at all, I don’t think. I’d be sitting in my gray castle politicking barons. You and your pretty wife would be living somewhere else, bigger, by the sea.”_

_“That’s how it should be, is it?"  
_

_“Of course! You’d have your home and your family, which is all you really wanted—and I wouldn’t need you, anyway, because I’d be surrounded by the love and exaltations of my grateful subjects, and so-having-thus a good lord wouldn’t want for a drop more. Everyone’s happy, you see?"  
_

_“But it’s not that way.”_

_No, thank God! Everyone’s miserable—so give me a kiss_ , Hans says. And tell it all back to me.

 

* * *

 

On his forty-second day in the monastery—while all the others are singing Agnus Dei, Lamb of God—Gregor hot-heels after Lucas into the Elysian garden. There, he interrupts him at the well, where the stricken student is pulling a pail to soothe his wounded face. A firm grip on a long arm makes Lucas drop the line. The bucket plunges and the dull _thock_ of it hits dark water far below.

“Where do you go,” Gregor demands, red-white with the chase, pivoting him away from the chasm, “when you’re not here?”

Lucas eyes him, surly, with a four-inch gash gnarled into his brow. “Meditation,” he sulks.

Gregor won’t let him turn back. A rude mitt steals and twists his chin—and Lucas outright crumples from it, seized by a fierce and frightened snarl, as though his body expects a strike. “Oh? They gave you that in Vespers, did they?”

“Punishment, all right? What the piss do you care?”

Forty-two days, and he’s tired of it. “Fuck off, Lucas. I know why your family threw you in here.”

It takes the vinegar out of him like a loose tooth. Hours-old blood seepage browns blond hair above his split eyebrow. He looks as though he might ask _how_ , but instead, in the quiet crumble of dread, answers the question for himself.

“So they told you. Good Christ.” Horror blooms into dismay. He places a steadying hand heel on the well lip, half-forgetting about Gregor, blinking down at the cobbles and blanching the color of clotted cream. “If _you_ know, everyone knows,” comes out of him, sick as a run of blood through the nose. Far below, hissing beneath the fear like underground water, is a smoke of anger. “They told anyway, those wretches. Those sons-of—”

“They didn’t tell me shit. I’ve had a look at the abbot’s records.”

“You did what? That’s not—I'll report it.”

“Come on, brother. Will that help you?”

Lucas thinks about it, but only for a moment. In one instant, he looks like he might vomit, and in another, like he might knock Gregor on his arse and make a break for it. Henry, having seen that expression before on hopeless people and captured thieves, prepares to absorb the blow and dash after—because if he runs, perhaps this truly is his horse-butcher, after all. But none of that happens. Lucas is blue-eyed as baby’s-breath inside the swollen socket bruise; they are eyes that show all of his youth and all of his honesty as he pulls a wrapped book from his belt and tears off the cloth.

“Look,” he swears, brushing castaway linen into the grass, cracking the tome and pointing to its title as if to insist. “You see this? It’s the abbot’s _—_ he gave it to me himself. Whatever notes you dug out of a waste bin, whatever you think, whoever that was, it’s not Lucas. I’m a different person now. I’ve learned, and I’m reformed.”

It says _Evil Morals in—_ but Henry doesn’t squint long enough to read it all. He slaps the book’s underside, sending it fluttering out of his brother's hands, and the smack of leather on rockface startles sparrows from the young lime tree. Now Lucas snaps up at him like he really will sock Gregor in the jaw.

“What in the Hell are you—!”

“Get that out of my face. I don’t care about your fucking book, man,” he spits, and snatches his arm again, stopping him from collecting it. Lucas yanks it free, but Henry can no longer tell how much he really means it, and how much this black look has simply become a part of who he is. He does not try to convince him to look any other way. He only asks: “Why on earth did John do that to you?”

Lucas does not tell him right away. But the ornery face shifts, almost imperceptibly, to something with more rue than spleen. “You think this looks bad?”

He rolls up his overspill of sleeve, and as he does, inch-by-inch, the stripes appear—partway scabbed, rough-healed, rust-brown to poppy-red and bumpy. They litter the tender eggskin inside his elbow, tearing off love spots. The longest ones wind up and up, no sign of stopping, yet they must stop somewhere—they have to—and Henry grabs that bony wrist one final time to force the cloth up to his shoulder. Still more. He pulls the shapeless robe out by the collar and peers down an armhole to see Lucas’s ribs.

There, they are finger-thick and horrific, wounds rising like pale brown snakes beneath milk. Some of the stripped flesh hasn’t filled-in. He looks at the torso of his brother and feels sick with anger, and he can think of nothing but the pretty chestnut yearling lying club-beaten to raw meat in the courtyard of Neuhof and coughing every breath with the last of its blood.

“I don’t know how they found out. I didn’t say—I didn’t _do_ anything, you must believe me. But I had the bad luck one night to find them at their secret drinking, the sloshed-up old sheep-fuckers. It was an accident, I promise you, but they swore I’d regret it. And I do.” Lucas does not pull away anymore. Gregor releases him; he fixes the poor boy’s habit for him, picks up his book about evil from where it landed beside the mint plants, hands it back. His temper makes him dizzy and contrite. “You ask me where I go? They lock me in the cavern with Procopius’s bones every time I sneeze—dirty water, no candle. This is what I get when I am ‘insubordinate’ about it. As if I ought to thank them for the torture.”

“Lucas, Jesus. You’ve got to tell Nevlas about this. He won’t stand for it.”

“What am I going to _tell_ him, Gregor?” He dusts the rumpled cover, tired-out from having been handled too much. “It will all stop when Peter comes back. I study languages; he likes me. They won’t dare risk angering the abbot.”

“Peter’s ill in Kuttenberg; he may never come back.”

Lucas tucks away his reading, and his naturally stern look goes an even harder blue. “You’re just like the others. All of you, waiting like crows for an old man to drop dead. You don’t know that.”

“I don’t, but neither do you. You have to at least consider what you’ve got if he doesn’t. Is this how you want it to go for the rest of your life?”

“Forget you know anything about me, Gregor.”

“I will not.”

“Then pretend we never spoke. You’ll only make things worse.”

“You’re being locked up and flogged bloody in a house of God, for Christ’s sake—how could it be any worse? Look, they can’t expect you’ll keep silent about this forever. Antonius is the provost’s protégé; let him talk to Nevlas for you. He’ll get them to—”

Lucas, who’d since returned to the well in protest of his brother’s babbling, hauls a full pail out. Before he washes his cut, he stares Gregor dead in the eye and he points his finger and he promises: “If you tell Antonius about me, I’ll make you sorry. I don’t know just how, but Lord help me, I will. You had better keep your mouth shut—with everyone—but especially around him.”

Henry is too perplexed to feel threatened. This has often been his weakness, he supposes. He wonders what his life might be like if he were less curious and all things were the way they ought to be.

“All right,” he relents. The swish of a squared bandage slipped out of a pocket and dipped into the bucket strikes him as more aggressive than it needs to be. “Silence, then.”

Lucas is not wholly relieved. Merely resigned, perhaps, to the murkiness of his future. He presses the damp linen against his brow and the trickle downwards runs red.

“You walk around here like you don’t understand—it’s like you’re a child. You ought to be more careful, Gregor,” warns his brother, only now flinching, head-hanging over the pail. In its darkness, sullied water still looks clean. “About whom you tell things. You’re nobody’s son anymore. You need to look out for yourself.”

Henry—who cannot scrape the embers of the forge from his dreams, nor the reek of seared horsemane, nor the twist of his mother’s hair in mud or the tatter of blood into his father’s felt hat—swallows whatever words try to curdle up. He is startled deeply behind Gregor’s ignorant, farmboy face. “What do you mean?”

 _I mean_ , Lucas says, impatient, bleeding. “That any one of these godly men could throw your soul straight into the fire.”

 

ooo

 

On his forty-third day, Gregor asks Siskin to take the lock off Jodok’s chest. There is nothing inside but a flask of drinking water and a pair of winter boots.

 

ooo

 

On his forty-fourth day, it hails all night. Gregor waits until Siskin is away at his secret reading, and rummages for secrets in the loose tiles under his bed, cloaked by the noise of ice against finger-thick glass.

 

ooo

 

On his forty-fifth day, Lucas disappears again. _“You’re all wrong about him,”_ Gregor swears to Antonius as they prepare the meal hall for supper, but won’t tell any more. His brother looks faraway as he whittles stew turnips into nothing and says, _I hope that I am._

ooo

 

On his forty-sixth day, he can’t shore his anger, and asks Provost Nevlas with all the innocence stored in his guts, _“Why is Brother Lucas sometimes away during Lauds?”_ Nevlas, preoccupied at the distillery, squints one eye up from his stripped bark and skinned berries and mumbles, bland as tallow, _“Oh, is he? He’s so quiet, I suppose no one’s missed him. I haven’t noticed him there or gone.”_

 

ooo

 

On his forty-seventh day, Henry exercises the last leaf of cleverness he has left, and slips into the basement after dinner. He offers to help scrub dishes and with an armful of filthy plates he wedges a chunk of dough into the cellar lock. That night, as John sleeps soundly, he sneaks downstairs and creeps through Procopius’s corridor in naked feet, afraid the soles of his slippers will give him away.

“Lucas,” he whispers at the far bolted door, too skittish to knock-knock, carrying his candle close. “Are you in there?”

There’s no immediate answer, and for an instant of whistly breathing in the dark, Henry wonders if perhaps he’s found a way to escape—if, maybe, a boy who didn’t deserve what he got has practiced being still and silent so much, he’s taught himself to vanish, and is running through the cat’s-tail plumes far away from here. But in the next moments, waiting for a hint or sign or who-knows-what, he hears a shuffling and a sleepy grumble from behind the wrought iron.

“What on earth are you doing pissing around down here, Gregor?” Lucas asks him tiredly from the other side, sounding distant, as if flung into the bottom of a garden well. “Do you want to get us both horsewhipped?”

“I brought you something to eat, is all.” He crouches and slips a whole unsalted flatcake through the inch of clearance under the door. The thin thing barely makes it through unsoiled, but Lucas takes it, and that’s everything Henry has. “Sorry it’s just more bread. I couldn’t exactly smuggle a bowl of soup out of the refectory in my pocket.”

There is quiet for a second that feels like ages. The blacksmith wonders if he will ever be a blacksmith again—if time will ever be normal again—if beyond the red walls and emerald glass, the sun rises and falls in a way that makes sense.

“You’d better get back to bed, brother. Before Jodok notices you’re not where you’re supposed to be.”

“Ah, to Hell with him. Though you’re not wrong.” He holds his light close to the lock, wishing he was Siskin, and understood such complicated problems. The unpaved ground is bitter and inhospitable. “When will they let you out—do you know?”

“Does it seem like they’d tell me that? I’m not even sure how long I’ve been down here.”

“More than a two-day, I think. Do you want my candle?”

“No. John would ask how I got it. It’s safer if you just go on.”

“All right. If you’re not out tomorrow, I’ll try to bring you something more. Don’t you need water? Maybe if I poured it on a plate, bit by bit—”

Holy places steal your language. There isn’t much to say here, of this cave where sainted marrow once laid bare or in this whole citadel with its singing tower. But from then on, when Lucas speaks to Gregor, he does it with a little less rancor in his voice, and a little less hatred, too.

The words no longer come easily to him, but he gathers them up. “Thank you, Gregor. You don’t know how much it helps to hear someone else’s voice.”

"Even mine?" Gregor has only one chuckle to give.

"Even so."

Friendship feels wrong in this House of God. So he does not try—not next to the cave mushrooms and the memory of Procopius, of his empty bowl and missing corpse. Instead, where a normal man would say farewell, Henry shores up his courage, and he raps his knuckles goodbye on the locked iron door.

 

ooo

 

On his forty-eighth day, swollen stormclouds forebode the loss of summer, and Gregor cannot focus. He feels like a hound chasing the last of a long-gone scent. Mist seeps in through his ears and chews a nest in his brain. He doesn’t remember anything all morning.

Until he turns a corner on his way to the scriptorium, and there is Lucas, straw-headed and free, except he’s not—he’s being staggered back down the dormitory stairs toward the cellar by Stibor, hunched halfway over and black at both eyes—and there’s no reality in which Henry can be like Nevlas _ah-hmm_ ing at his healing table or like Cyril book-buried in his study or like Phineas with his clogged ears negating his open heart. There is no version of him or disguise he can wear that will permit he bow his head for God and allow whatever will happen to happen.

Foreign words come out of his mouth and though he cannot remember what they were, he does remember the way Lucas stumbled at the surprise of his voice, toe catching a step, and he does remember the disbelief flaring like snake poison in the circator’s face.

Stibor cannot cane Gregor without dropping Lucas, but as he considers which sinner more deserves his whipping, Henry pokes fingers through the stuffing of this whole two-month façade and blurts, “You think it’s God’s work, what you’re doing to that boy? You can’t bludgeon your own evil out of another man—”

And then his memory catches its toe on a stairwell, too.

The Benedictine, neither old nor young, looks away from the torment he has orchestrated only long enough to prophesize.

 _If you think yourself such a saint,_ says he, with Lucas’s noseblood invisible on the black of his robes, _then you’ll fit fine on the pyre, too._

 

ooo

 

On the forty-ninth night, when John locks Gregor away for the sin of _unclean ideation_ , Lucas sneaks down to the cavern with breadcrust and a dish full of water, and through the candlelight under the prison door he whispers:

_Everything Antonius told you is a lie._

As the sun breaks aboveground, on his fiftieth morning in the monastery, Gregor is liberated in time for dawn prayer.

 

* * *

 

Prior Phineas at his pulpit instructs them daily how not to burn:

**_Forthwith to dash down upon the Rock, even Christ, any evil thoughts approaching the heart. To have wholesome fear of the day of judgment. With fear to shrink from hell._ **

—and of fire, Henry’s learned its smell and sounds. He’s learned the hush of burning rooftops, like wind whipping barley fields; he’s learned the chaos of a mare screaming madness as she runs death-circles with a pitchfork gored between her ribs—

**_To have the expectation of death daily before one’s eyes._ **

—and he’s learned the taste and tenor of terror in sunlight, the sight of swollen tongues that no longer fit comfortably inside the mouths of friends. Flesh unable to remember how it sat just yesterday—how it laughed and flushed and moved behind smiles, back-before when there were smiles that did not also seem to him like the foreshadowing of bare-boned teeth, of a skeleton beneath, of shown skull—

**_Hour by hour to keep guard over one’s every act._ **

—and something in his eyes must give him away—

**_To hate one’s own will._ **

—because at first prayer, in first light, as these holy men lace their fingers and bow, torturers and rapists in alleluia among them, Antonius slips two rows over from Gregor and, worried, wondering, liked a friend, catches his attention with a fragile baring of teeth—

**_To know for certain that God sees one everywhere._ **

—and his whole handsome face is filling with horse blood—

**_To recognize that evil always comes from self._ **

—bubbling from the nostrils and seeping beneath the eyes and flooding the crumpled floor of her breached lung, because no one can catch her to slit her throat, the poor curséd thing, as she runs and howls herself to ruin in a knell that invites wolves from the deepwoods to come afield that night, to tear meat from their dead and dying bones—

**_To make peace before the setting of the sun._ **

—and Antonius looks away from Henry as if burned by the swell of a fire—

**_Behold, these are the instruments of the spiritual art, that which, when they shall have been ceaselessly employed by us day and night and duly given back in the day of judgment, shall be recompensed to us by that reward from God which He promised: “That which the eye hath not seen, nor the ear heard, and that hath not entered into the human heart—”_ **

_I know that this has to be done._

 

At breakfast, Gregor puts bread in his mouth and tastes blood. The chandeliers spin into linden trees as he stands up and falls cold to the ground.

 

* * *

 

Months ago—ages ago—when summer was new and the words _oboedientia, opprobria_ had never once touched the roof of his mouth, Henry tells the young lord he must go away again for a while. It is difficult for Hans not to quarrel with Radzig about him, and about other things, too. _“But you were just gone half the winter,”_ he protests, looking for reasons, wanting it to be injustice when it is only the difference between a noble’s life and everyone else. _“Why does it have to be you?_ _Out of all the spear-carriers in his half-arsed orphan army? Why my blacksmith’s boy?”_

 _“Why you,”_ he says, when the young lord really means _why can’t they ever let me be?_

But Henry bids him not to make a stink about it, and so to get back at the displaced kingsman that is his guest, Hans merely drags Sir Radzig’s favorite toady out on a final season’s hunt. _“I don’t want to lay eyes on so much as a brick for a week,”_ Lord Capon declares, overfilling a saddlebag with crispy bread and good cheese and fine wine. He wakes Henry while the dawn stars are still simmering, whispery-eager as a lad, tugging both of their horses by the bits. He neglects to inform anyone of his sporting schedule—which exasperates poor Captain Bernard and infuriates Sir Hanush—but it’s no adventure, Hans insists, if everyone knows where in the woods you are.

Under a rind of pink sky, they ride the lazy and overgrown river path north, past Kohelnitz, ducking through buggy tunnels of durmast oaks and startling otters. Hans, who has less interest in pursuit than escape, suggests as a lark they ought to ford it and disappear into the wilds for good, to lose their tracks in the current and join Hanekin Hare’s jolly band of brigands, live a life of strapping villainy. They might rob Radzig’s camp for a little gambling money, he proposes. Cut free his horses and steal his liquor. Henry, alas, politely demurs on account of not being able to swim.

Mid-morning, they stop at a slow curve where the deep forest creeps right up to water’s edge and the sandy bed is tall enough to walk on—and among the broken-down remains of old wagon crossings, Hans insists he will teach Henry a proper breaststroke. But no matter how he moves or how much breath he can hold, hardening his lungs into a dark pain for its want to escape, Hal sinks like a rock.

 _Chicken_ , Hans snickers at him as he comes up choking and spitting, chest-deep in water. Henry aborts his mangled beginner’s stroke and fights furiously to right himself. He grabs for the ancient root of a half-submerged willow tree as if at any second, a wave will rear up and sweep him partway to Sasau. “I wouldn’t have let you wash away, you know.”

The young lord sits there lazily on the same gnarled old serpent of root, with his shirts husked and hose rolled up over his knees and his calves in dark water, sipping weak beer from a clay jug. The blacksmith sputters and clings fast. Sun glisters across the surface and throws magic shapes into Henry’s eyes.

“As if you'd have a choice in the matter. That current is a lot stronger than it looks.” And the hard sand beneath his toes is cold. He can stand here, but Hal won’t dare let go to do it on his lonesome. Wet bark flakes beneath his arms as a woodpecker has-at a black pine in the woody cliffs behind them. A little breeze shimmies the cattails, and glugs water into Henry’s open mouth that tastes faintly of trout and like something that could have been a good memory, if he’d been born differently, in some other place. “You’re going to fight the river, are you. You’re going to fish me out of a runaway rapid with your bowstring, is that it.”

“Well, I’d dive in and retrieve you, of course.”

It’s fledgling summer—June—and in June, Hans runs like an idiot, tumbling into the woods to get dark and thorn-scraped and lean. His body is dashed with sunfreckles and his spotty shoulders are like the baby hair of a fawn as he sits there with his clothes discarded and feet in the river, and he’s easily as beautiful as anyone in those boring old Troy stories Radzig is always going on about as if to warn you of something, and then more-so because he is real. He looks like some gold-feathered thing fallen from the sky into fresh snow, though naturally Henry won’t tell him that.

“Oh, sure. Retrieve me.” He pinches away water that leeches from his hair and into his eyes. The young lord reaches down and swishes the jar _yes-no_ by Hal’s face, but he’s not yet recovered enough to accept. “You’d drown like a cat.”

Hans swallows his mouthful of drink and swings his legs and looks defiant for a moment, red and squint-eyed in the sun. “Why not? If that’s what it took. I’d drown—and I’d fleece your hairy arse out of the Styx on the other side.”

“Get on,” Henry groans.

“For you? I would, too. And I'd do it with a smile on my face.”

“Shut up. Anyway, between the two of us, I’m the one meant to do the noble dying. Isn’t that how it’s supposed to go? Knight jumps on a sword?”

Hans looks sidelong at him with a sharp bemused piece of something in his eye. “You’re a blacksmith, village boy.”

“I am. And you’re still the lord.”

There is a lark in the leaves above them, practicing its songs. Henry thinks about trying to swim again—to dare the things he has been told how to do. But there are certain secrets no manner or matter of trying will open to you; there are, he has found, _might-have-been_ stories about life that no amount of wanting will make real.

 _We had better tell it to the water, then,_ Hans sighs, disturbing the image of his face with a finger, futile, and flicking some river into the woods. _Tell it to the trees._

 

The young lord of Rattay told him once that, in a wood, there is only a single second. There, you are a creature of blood and body and air, a little animal. History and future do not exist.

But philosophy is not Hans Capon’s strong suit—there’s no prize at the end of that chase, no challenger to beat or skill to prove. And there _is_ still history. There is still time, even in-between the woodruff and the old oak trees. And it doesn’t matter whether Hans is ever as irresistible as he wants to be or if he is merely the irritating sort of handsome that rich young nobles are, because Henry is only interested in enough resistance to laugh at making a bad lord complain—because when he is with Lord Capon, he is a person who doesn’t have any reason not-to laugh. He is a person whose story is still being written, not burnt up behind him or scattered in the clear air above the silver hills. He is a person who has no doom and no fate. He is a person who never belonged somewhere else, or anywhere, or to anyone beyond the five letters of his name.

It’s no use trying to get a blacksmith to swim. They give up and climb out after a while to have a rest and fuck noisily in the fickle shade of the old willow, with Hans’s knees flung apart and Henry on top of him like a loverboy. He gives of himself freely; he chokes at a bite at his jugular, a firm hand pressing his tailbone; Hans says _kiss me, Hal,_ so he does; he tries his best not to worry about the way sound carries on these still days over the sheep fields and across the broad brown current, startling birds above tall red spruces, into cat whiskers of cloud. The sun is warm on his back, but the river’s turned everything else shivery, and Hans acts as if he wants to find their echo still jackrabbiting about these woods the next time he returns here to hunt. _Come closer, you hen,_ he bitches, _why are you a hundred miles away?_

As with most things men are supposed to do, His Lordship is a good sight better at this role than Henry is; his whole self is already strung fast as ship rigging and he doesn’t want some whiny nonsense to dismantle him. But a blacksmith is no match for archer’s arms—the next second, decisive hand heels knock the elbows up and out from under him, and air whuffs from his unsuspecting lung when they connect, as the young lord’s embrace is fierce enough to approach discomfort. _Let me breathe, you idiot,_ Henry complains, trying to peel his stomach away, but knows he’s not escaping without a fight. And even defeated handily—even feeling like a bunch of lousy rigging—he tips close as he can and holds it for him, just as he likes it, to calm down and so Hans can squirm and paw at his arms and make cow eyes at him for a while, and so Henry can bite his own lip and search vainly for some fortitude.

 _Hal,_ Hans asks, dark-eyed and sleepy-looking in the clover.

_Hm?_

_You don’t know, Hal. You don’t._

_Christ almighty. What are you even on about, man._

_What it’s like. When you're away. All the time. With all of them._

_Do you really want to talk about it this very second?_

_Yes! When else? It's fucking purgatory! You can't know. Having to live like this. You don’t know what it’s—Oh, come closer. I need you here._

_Enough of that, now._

_Hal, please, I need it._

It’s no use; Hans is away babbling all manner of stupidness now, which makes a distant edge of Henry a little angry, because he can’t figure out how to get any closer than he already is, and because the brat knows he can’t last for shit with him ruckusing like that. “ _If I lose it,”_ he threatens, “ _I’m leaving you just as you are.”_ Except he doesn’t really say that, or anything, because Hans’s eyes are the exact color of rain in the spring when it’s still cold enough to make you tremble, and Henry’s body finds a way in closer, somehow.

 _Thank God, finally,_ Hans groans, which is partway an insult, really; but then he drops his head woozily back onto the grass and calls him, for the first time, my love (which Henry’s never been called before, not ever, and it sets his heart spinning between his swimmer’s lungs, bright and hard and not-yet-dark). And Henry can’t bear to wonder right now how or what he’s supposed to understand. Hans looks like creature come out of the water, mouth chapped and fighting his heavy eyelids because it’s like him to always want to see. And it though it’s all utter nonsense he’s yammering, somewhere in the sluice of noises and affections and suggestions, he chokes _I’m so happy,_ like he can’t believe it _;_ and Henry is sure that, to keep that instant for him, he would cross the blackest, deepest river you could find.

Except he can’t go on, of course, not like this. So he instead avails himself of weakened limbs and separates their stuck skin, and he reaches down between them to take Hans into the heat of his palm, buttressing his thumb flush into the tender eave and rubbing gently, as Hans once taught him to do, and though he’s not a very good teacher and though Henry is no prize pupil, it’s too much-enough. The gray eyes crumple unwillingly closed and his stomach pitches and with a harsh, nosey wet yawp that is violent and precious like a fox on a hare he begins to stripe himself. _Oh, Christ_ , Hal quivers, gripping as the first of it slicks his hand. He holds on for a while to help, but then he can’t, and instead he’s grabbing clumsily for waist or ribs or anything and tearing accidental feathers of baby grass up with his fingers, hurrying for a vantage he’s already got as Hans issues valiantly beneath the full press of his hips. And it may as well be a thank-god, because with arms wrapped too tight around him Henry comes so sweet it hurts, that his head goes dark and his elbows give out and his brain boils and he doesn’t know anything except being whatever he is right now.

The world is softer when he drifts back out of the easy black you go to. River water ambles over smooth stones, a trout tail plips in the middle of its wide back, and the breeze delicately twists the willow tassels above them. There is birdsong, indifferent. Hans lies placidly beside him with hands laced loosely above his navel and lashes gently resting and the daffiest fucking smile on his face.

Henry groans in cold grass. His shoulders are sore and there are bits of green stuck under his nails. “Oh, come off whatever you’re on about, you fucking goose,” he complains, scrubbing at his eyes in an attempt to restore himself, rolling away to sit up. “I don’t want to hear it.”

“I’d die,” Hans swears, smile still, and throws his arms slack over his head like the naked drama of Saint Sebastian, “and I’d wash up in Hell like _this_.”

 _Get that stupid look off your face,_ Henry tells him, but he doesn’t. There’s nothing to dry off with, excepting their own clothes—Hans remembered beer, but not blankets, which means they will look woods-stained and rumpled all week. But there is plenty of sunshine and plenty to drink, and the young lord tee-hees like a complete moron when Hal gives him a pinch in the ribs, and retaliates with a slap smarting enough to leave a red mark where the skin is soft under Henry’s arm. And he can’t possibly be a blacksmith’s boy while he lies dripping wet beside that fool grin in grass that seems too green; he can’t possibly remember who he was before.

They might, too, have forgotten the horses, if not for a rustling in the foxtail around them. There’s a dull rummaging, and the squeak of blunt teeth gives up Hans’s hunting mare just before her dark head parts the scrub.

“What the fuck do you want, then,” her master wonders, and badly hucks one of his gold-spurred boots. It lands impotently in the sedges and goes ignored.

Henry glances about for wherever his own shoes got off to. Ambivalent about sex and martyrs, Pebbles follows Bellona through the reeds for lack of anything else to do, mussing their grass wall and reintroducing them to the idea of the dirt road.

“Up with you, too,” he charges, reaching for a discarded glove. “We’re an hour from your campsite and we still have to catch something to eat.”

Hans, eyes-closed in the sun, doesn’t budge. He folds his arms behind his head and looks altogether far too comfortable for the scenery. “No need. You selfishly befouled the cooking oil, so we’re going to starve.”

Henry’s eyes roll as he stands up to retrieve more castaways. “And there’s nothing we can do.”

“Nothing! Come sleep.”

“Naked on the ground? The game warden could ride right by here. And there you are, bold Lord Capon, his liege and master—snoring in the dirt, with your whole arse out and your boots in the weeds.”

“It’s not the worst place my arse has been found.”

“Someone could come.”

 _Impossible,_ the young lord disagrees from soft grass, certain, and entrusts his body to the auspice of trees. We’re the only two people left on the earth, he says. He says everyone else is off to Hell.

On the fiftieth day, in the night, he dreams of treetops on fire, and wakes with a heart darkened like stone.

He dreams all of Pirkstein burns to the ground.

 

 

 

**iii.**

 

 

 

Prior Phineas, on Brother Gregor’s first morning in the Order of St. Benedict, stood before his flock and read thus:

**_Hearken continually within thine heart, O son, giving attentive ear to the precepts of thy master. Understand with willing mind and effectually fulfill thy holy father’s admonition; that thou mayest return, by the labour of obedience, to Him from Whom, by the idleness of disobedience, thou hadst withdrawn._ **

Henry wakes from a dream of fire with his body wet and his nose full of blood, spitting up violence and dark matter. He does not know his names or where he is. He cannot stop or think or scream for revenge, or for stableboys, or for help. He melts head-to-toe with sick-sweat as he shivers up bucket after bucket of brackish foam and brown, clotted earth.

As he suffers under the last of morning, it gradually becomes clear that there is more than the Sasau stone beneath him. There is a bed of cloth twisted in chaos. There is a window full of light. There is chalky milk at his mouth and the weight of a hand on his back, and a storybook voice that insists over and over he must keep his head up and breathe.

 _I’m dying,_ Henry moans, pain-stupid and pounding the dormitory floor. He retches vainly when there’s nothing but thin red dripping left inside to fetch up. _It’s blood—can’t you see that I’m dying?_

 _It’s clay, brother_ , Antonius tells him, and cups his flagging neck with cold, damp hands. _For the poison. Keep your head up. You’re going to live._

As he dies and does-not, the Horse-Butcher holds his head off the floor and says let me tell you a Bible story. You haven’t heard this one, he says. He makes Henry drink more clay to soak the belladonna from his stomach, and he says:

 

_Once upon a time, there was a young boy. He was lost and miserable and he had no future. And when you are these things—lost, and futureless—you may find yourself tempted into the company of foolish people, and once there, you might be swayed into doing foolish things. And how easily do foolish things, given quarter, twist and careen into evil things. But though he did a measure of things both foolish and evil, and though he tried to forget he ever knew another way, the young boy learned he wasn’t truly lost. Because—when faced with greater and greater evils—there came a point he realized he was no longer a boy, and had not been in a very long time. So he turned, and ran away._

_His former friends didn’t take kindly to this desertion. They determined to punish their runaway. So they sent a hunting dog to find him and rip his throat in his sleep._

_The boy wasn’t stupid, though. He knew a hound would come, one day. So he sought to change his face and smell—he made himself look and speak and think so unlike his former self, he hoped no beast of his past could track him. He tried to win the trust and favor of every dog and maybe-dog he met. He tried trickery to confuse the hound, to make it mistake other boys for its mark. But alack, despite everything, the beast caught his scent, and so the boy hid a poison flower inside a drop of honey, and fed it to him like a friend._

_But, as the hound lay dying, the boy thought of his true enemies. He remembered how they had come to him with friendship, too, only to lead him into sin and threaten him with death—how he, too, had once been a hound. And all of a sudden, he felt terribly sorry for what he had done. So he gave the hound medicine to undo the sickness, to purge the poison, and he offered it a bargain._ _  
_

 

 _Instead of one hound,_ Antonius says, steadying Henry’s head with vomit on his robes, _there could be two._

Henry is too sick to be angry as he should be. His head whirls hurly-burly and his guts are unspeakable; his mouth tastes like bile and riverbed. Breathing, worse, is full of foul solids that sting up behind the eyes—light seems spiteful—everything is such blur that, for a moment, the whole thing might be only a lonely dream. Henry’s not certain he-himself actually asks the question he thinks about asking, either, or if he just chokes nonsense into the sour dormitory air.

Until the Horse-Butcher stops toweling off Gregor's arms long enough to answer: “It’s Antonius—well, it was, until you went and fucked everything up. And right before that, Dmitrei. You’re looking for Pious. But it was something before that, too, you know.”

Henry hiccups and lurches as though he’ll throw up again, for the dozenth or hundredth time, but nothing comes. It makes him dog-whimper, though he’s too miserable to appreciate the metaphor. His pupils are the size of coins and Antonius will not let him have any water until he can prove he’s not pissing out blood. Henry feels as dry as a chicken bone tossed in the sun to read omens. He has little sense of the relation of his body to time and space.

 _It’s Pavel_ , Antonius tells him, and scrapes pestled parsley into a bottle of something sharp. “If you want an honest name.”

Why, he must ask. Because it’s been burning at his brain for fifty days and nights, and then-some—because it’s the only thing one can and should ask—but Henry doesn’t get any farther than a rough word before he’s being sat up proper and a spoon of green-tasting paste is shoved in his cheek.

“You were going to ruin me. Or kill me, as far as I know. Was I supposed to let that happen—accept my penance, walk politely into my own grave? I’m not that godly a man. And I daresay you aren’t, either.”

 _No_ , Henry clacks around the mouthful of herbs. They wither his tongue to cotton and make his burnt-out nose feel cool. Antonius—Pavel’s—arm cradled under his shoulders is the only thing keeping him upright. He would cry with the wrongness of it, if he could. He would shriek some justice for that beaten yearling, its punctured mother. He chokes: _Why did you do it? To the horses?_

He cannot see the Horse-Butcher's face. And he does not know enough of regret to tell false-sorrow from true repentance, anyway. He has only the strength of the limb under his back, and the knowledge of rat’s blood trapped in a man’s stare.

“If you think I won’t hear that sound for the rest of my days,” he swears, and for the first time, that silvery voice shakes and crumples like a spike to the back of the leg. “The mares, screaming—”

A shutter of doves’ wings outside the window. Pavel takes the spoon carefully from Henry’s teeth, allows him one single sip of spirits, and lays him back down. From here, he can see better. He looks for fangs and wolf’s pelt—for anything a horse-butcher should be—but it still only looks like Antonius: a grave face, no less handsome for the butchery, wounded with two black eyes.

“What happened at Neuhof,” Pavel urges him, and even as the blacksmith‘s son lies there on stains of his own sweat and sick, leans over to grip both Henry’s shoulders sternly in his hands, “made me realize my life wasn’t worth shit. So I ran. I ran right out of that stable with the blood still hot on my fingers and cinder on my heels and I came here. But I swear to you, Gregor—or Karl, or whoever you are—that I didn’t kill the old groom, or put hands on a single one of those boys. I’ve done terrible things. Evil things. Most I don’t want to remember. But if I’m lying, may God Almighty rip my throat out Himself.”

“Don’t talk to me so much,” Henry groans, flexing and unflexing the hands at the ends of his wrists, trying to make the spinning stop. “I can’t think about anything. You fed me poison flowers?”

“Nightshade. It grows under the lavatorium and there’s some root pushing up through a wall crack.”

“Oh, perfect.”

“That and a whole brick’s worth of clay. I begged Nevlas to let me care for you.” He shakes his head and taps the silver spoon against a bottle lip. “Monks are gullible souls. Take some ginger for your stomach. You’ll be all right, excepting that you’ll probably see double for another day.”

You ought not chew on anything given to you by a poisoner, but he does, if only to cut the wretched taste. Blowing his nose is hideous and hurts, but it feels like benediction to no longer have muck clogging up the deep chambers of his head.

He chomps down one last time, then spits the used ginger into his fist, and rasps: “What kind of idiot kills someone and then un-kills him?”

“The same idiot who blames another man for murder and then tries to take it back. I half-thought I’d be killing you to spare Lucas—which would’ve also, of course, been my fault—but somehow you saw through it. My story was awfully good, though. I’m sort of impressed.”

“He did. Not I.”

“Well, I suppose that explains why he never spoke to me.”

Antonius, who is difficult to call by any other name, even in the secrecy of his throbbing skull, holds a slop bucket out to drop the discarded root into. Then he departs Henry’s field of vision briefly to empty it through a latrine. When he returns, it is with one final peace offering: a dagger, ivory-handled, tarnishing. Pious’s—at least, if anyone’s story is safe to believe.

Henry doesn’t even have the wits to wonder if he’s about to be stabbed. Before anything else, Pavel flips it onto the pallet as casually as a worn old slipper, and sits beside him on his knees.

“We’re both pawns in someone else’s game, you know,” the Horse-Butcher tells him, and like scripture, he says:

But we won’t have to be, anymore.

 

* * *

 

When he was a child, too young to really remember, Ma once took him into the skinny woodlands just beyond Skalitz mill to fish. Henry recalls the squirm of amber grasshoppers between his fingers, snatched out of scraggly sedges. He remembers the creek around his ankles, knowing it was too shallow to swallow him up.

 _“Now, don’t you go wandering off into oblivion on me, Hal!”_ Ma chided him as he splashed after frogs and insects, sapling poles propped on her shoulders, a basket swinging in the middle for caught perch. He was not allowed to leave the path to pick up pretty stones for fear he might get lost. _“If we're not back before nightfall, your dear Da will tear this forest up tree-by-tree, he will.”_

 _“With his bare hands!”_ young Henry laughed, vindicated by the ridiculous thought of fighting a forest, at the outrageousness of his father’s fear. The knowing they could not be saved delighted him. He thought of Da standing outside in lightning, in a hailstorm, trying to catch the toppling linden tree. “ _Like a giant! He’ll drain the river dry!”_ he cried. “ _Turn over the rocks! Cut open all of the wolves!”_

 _"Poor old worrywart,”_ Mother agreed, sorry. _"He’ll put all the animals out of their home."_

 

* * *

 

After the poison—even as Phineas reads his Rules day-in-and-day-out and the sun rises-then-sets over dark water—here is what stray hounds must do:

**_The first degree of humility is obedience without delay._ **

You cannot escape God in the daylight. They count their hours and plan each step of the flight by the clock. It is best, they decide, to do their hard work through the final twitches of night, and flee into morning sun.

**_As soon as any order has been given by a superior, as being the same as if the order were divinely given, they can brook no delay in carrying it out._ **

You can’t escape God’s arms through a locked door. Henry persuades Pavel to bring Siskin—who is planning his own breakout, anyway—into the fold. He picks the lock on Prior Phineas’s bedroom door during mass, creeps in, and filches a single fish off his ring of spares. They replace the balcony key with the almost-matched one to the petty garden shed. He won’t notice, Siskin’s sure, until long after they’ve scurried down the scaffolding and run halfway to a sea.

**_Concerning these the Lord says: “As the ear heard, he obeyed Me.”_  
**

You can’t escape God’s eyes in a habit. Henry exchanges meaningless favors with Brother Cellarius to slip into the overseer’s laundry and fish out some laymen’s clothes. **  
**

**_And again He says to teachers: “He who hears you, hears Me.”_ **

You can’t escape God’s ears on foot. Pavel, though Henry dares not ask how, arranges for three old horses to be left unattended in the marshy glade at the far side of Sasau River, tied beneath a willow fall. He pays for them with most of Siskin’s stolen silver. Distance, he explains, is more crucial than making no sound in the forest and leaving no rattle of coins.

**_Without doubt such as these reproduce that maxim of the Lord’s wherein He says: “I came not to do My will, but His Who sent Me.”_ **

You can’t escape God’s anger without blood. Pavel knows the Neuhof marauders will never lose his scent unless their noses are confused by other death-smells. He orders a skin of goat’s blood to make soup, but pours it instead into a wine jug to hide among Nevlas’s medicine bottles, ready to be smeared on the floor. _We’ll make it look,_ he professes, pressing his dagger into Henry’s hand, _like I tried to stop you from running, and the two of you killed me. Then you dragged my corpse out onto the scaffold—out into open air—toward the water—_ ** _  
_**

**_Thus do they seize the narrow way of which the Lord says: “Narrow is the way that leads to life.”_ **

You will never escape God’s wolves across the earth. To disappear without a body, Pavel says, without tracks or prints or trace, they must wade downstream into the star-pocked river, and crawl out through the trees on the other side.

 

ooo

 

On the fifty-ninth day—as the moon withdraws and the sky yawns its darkest shade before dawn—three brothers meet in the garden, and flee.

They strip out of their white robes and bury them under the eyebright. They soil Pious’s dagger. They count the last of Siskin’s stolen silver. They slop the goat’s blood into cheesecloth and drag it across the paver floor.

They run up the library stairs in their builders’ boots to the balcony door. A key fits in and turns over the lock.

There is no time to navigate the rickety scaffold ladders or risk the crumbling low walls around St. Procopius’s cave. Henry has prepared a rope of old blankets strung together with his father’s surest smith’s knots to help them hop quickly down, before the sun rises and anyone sees. He tosses it over and fastens the other side tight to the banister. Outside, stars are fading nightshade-blue, poison-bright, but the sky above the Sasau Wood is not fully awake.

“What’s holding you back, Brother Karl?” Siskin dares, face keen as a cat in the seconds before it takes after a bird. “Do you want to say a prayer?”

Henry is too nervous to push him away or even to grin. He feels the damp yard on his skin from up here, somehow—hears the maples rustle beyond the chapel, smells the wild sage that grows along the outer wall. They'll descend, then they’ll climb again. Past the bee boxes, and the turnip patch, and the fishing dock, and into the black current. It seems impossible. His heart swells with nothing—not fear, not joy—but it shivers, a chick in its egg, waiting for sunlight and a sign it is ready to attempt the whole world.

 _You first,_ he whispers, and Siskin swings a leg over the rail, and they are away.

It’s a funny thing, he thinks, helping Pavel rub a last panicked touch of goat’s blood around the threshold, into eras of holy dust. This is the only time he’s ever seen them look like anything but monks, and in hard heels and hosen and shirts with snaps on the wrists, his brothers are like new. Young Smil, who prefers _Siskin_ to being a father’s namesake, is a different man—one who seems like he ought to train running dogs or play the lute. Pavel is no monk; he is someone else, someone who really would poison you and feel awful about it. Henry wonders whom and what it is he-himself looks like. Would anyone but God know by the shape of his hands or depth of his brow that he was once a blacksmith’s boy?

There are pieces of scripture in his ears now he cannot forget. He looks for torches in the courtyard below them, and wonders what it is St. Benedict was so afraid of being disappointed by—what darkness he thought one could be spared by saving everything good in life for death.

Sparrows fight in the belfry. Henry thinks, for a moment, one has tumbled in through the window glass and been trapped. But it isn’t.

It is Lucas behind them with a book in his arm and a dropped cup of water rolling across the floor.

No one moves for a breath. Siskin hangs off the balcony. Pavel looks like a hound with unsmiling teeth in his mouth and nothing written in his black eyes.

 _I saw,_ Lucas murmurs, _blood._

Lucas—who wakes before all of them like the smallest and smartest of birds; whose early mornings they have forgotten about, because everyone forgets Lucas; who clutches the rules Peter gave him as if he is drowning in a rapid and the list of _evil morals_ is the only thing that keeps him afloat—does nothing. His stare moves tick-tock from Henry to Pavel (Antonius) and back. In the last of night, before they have asked God to forgive them, he looks as if he might at any second spirit away in an eruption of feathers.

 _Oh, fuck,_ Siskin curses. Pavel glances to Henry and every horror he has resigned himself to commit surfaces under that soft gaze like the mad eye of a whale.

His hands are slathered in goat’s blood. Henry picks up his arm and he waves.

“Come on, Lucas.”

The boy stands frozen in his habit at the top of the library stairs, jumping imperceptibly, like his bones heard more than the rest. Siskin, waiting on someone to pass over his satchel of treasure, takes one glimpse at the dark possibility on Pavel’s face, and even knowing nothing of dead horses or poisoned dogs, he blurts, "Let’s just leave him. Let’s go," he says as though to stop something that must happen from happening. "They’ll all be in Lauds, anyway—just leave him—we’ll all be five miles away—"

The dagger is already dirty there in Pavel’s hand. They are supposed to cast it away in the tall grass as if flung there in haste, as if their arms were busy carrying the body. The body they hauled up the flight, to the door, and dropped—

Henry’s soles across the wooden boards are brisk and loud.

 _Come on, Lucas,_ he pleads, and pulls him toward the balcony by the front of his robes. “Nothing to it. Down you go—”

Siskin is already halfway now. There is red at the farthest ridge of the world, silhouetting thick trees where horses may or may-not be. Peter’s poor boy, who asked for none of this, stutters over the floor, his arms crossed tightly, pressing the distressed tome against the cove of his chest, until Henry yanks them apart by force. The book slaps split-faced on the ground. He kicks it away before Lucas can think about picking it up.

“I can write things down, too,” Gregor-but-not-Gregor insists, raw with the time they don’t have, struggling to halter his temper and volume as Siskin peers up at them from below, as Pavel hovers behind with his knife. Lucas blinks back into the stale dark. Henry shakes him and steps between the child of a monk and the way back inside. “Look here, little brother. The abbot is going to die. Maybe not today, but one day. Do you want to wager your next fifty years on whether or not there’s another old man to take pity on you?”

“It doesn’t matter. You made a vow—”

“It fucking _does_ matter! Peter doesn’t like you, Lucas; he mercies you, and that’s all. You’ve barely got started on your life. You want to live the whole thing hoping to be mercied by some old man who gives you books about how gracious he is for not torturing you? The same old man whose best and brightest allow brutes like John and Stibor to do that to your eye, and don’t bat a lash? Do you want to get old yourself and be like them, too—do you want to turn your cheek because that’s what some sickly abbot with one foot in the grave says it’s what God wants?”

“I won’t tell them I saw you. I’ll go down to Lauds and I won’t make a peep, I swear. That’s a—”

“This is it, you stupid ass,” Henry groans; the sun is wounded eggyolk over the forest now, and Pavel will wait only another moment. Lucas loses his hands in the spill of his habit. His face is a confusion of blue glass and broken skin and mistrust and mangled hopes. He looks no different from a blacksmith’s son standing under the smoke of a dead castle and unable to run back or away.

“Your family is gone, Canute. They’re not coming to visit. They’re never going to take you home. You have to be something else now,” Henry tells him, and turns him around in the last bit of darkness toward the river and the low stone wall. He expects him to feel bony and lamentable beneath the weight of his hands, but he doesn’t. His cheeks are sunken but his spine is straight and his shoulders are still strong.

“Don’t say anything more. Just take up the rope,” Henry tells him, “and climb.”

They go. The fabric is pliant in their fists and threatens to give, but Father’s knots don’t fail, not a one. Siskin pats Lucas’s back with unearned friendship when he touches down, and Lucas is stunned bright and slippery-brained like a spot of mercury, and Pavel is only a few arm’s reaches above them, and when Henry lets go, all he can think about is pulling off his boots and sinking barefoot into grass that feels as alive as a clam at the bottom of a lake. Fine hairs he never noticed rise in the chilly air and everything seems fresh and dangerous. They sprint low like children playing war through rye, over wild dandelions and planted chamomile, and Henry never quite believed Antonius could have ever been a bandit until he clears that last fence in one deer-graceful leap and just like that he is Pavel the Pious running hard from the sound of dying horses and burning straw.

The river no longer feels like summer. It is slyly cold and beneath its dark surface, the current seems fast around his shins.

Henry clutches hard on the thread of his calmness. He tries to remember all the things he has learned about staying buoyant—about trusting your body and never stopping, lest you sink. He tries to dredge for his courage as the undertow separates around his hips and they all slosh elbows-linked after Pavel, who swims strongest. And it’s so much deeper here than he thought it would be, and they’re almost-breaking, hopping for breath, and Henry doesn’t know whether he can keep above water or not.

His knees lock when the water rears up and over his chest. There is an unexpected wave, subsuming them briefly, and the mouthful he catches tastes bottomless and arcane, like something he has never done before, and he doesn’t know this river, or these people, or how to capsize and stay breathing, or anything beyond the smell of storms and ashen houses and horses lying dead on hot dirt.

 _I can’t swim_ , Henry begins to say; he tries to tell them he can’t go this way, that he’ll have to find some other escape. But before the air fords into his lungs to drive out the words, Lucas next-in-line pushes him hard, and his feet paw away from the shoal.

 

They emerge on the other side exhausted, shivering like dogs and waist-high with mud. Everyone is too tired to whoop or to cry. Freedom feels like fine grains, like pouring sand—it’s hard to get a grip on anything. Siskin clutches the sodden pack of family silver like a babe on a breast and poor Lucas, white dipped gray, has lost both of his shoes. Pavel trudges, panting, off into the trees. Henry lies bonelessly on the bank, looking at the crimson ribs of the monastery in the distance, and tries to find himself again.

There is nothing for them but to shudder and gasp and hope their leader returns.

He does—clomping out of the swampy wood, tattered by thorns, with a line of three raggedy carthorses tied at their noses like sisters. The relief is indescribable. It overtakes them so quickly there is only the urge to close their eyes.

“We didn’t expect to need four,” Pavel explains, thinly, but for all that his filly-strangling heart must be pounding, he does not sound unkind. “You’ll have to come with one of us, I suppose. But this is as far as I’ve planned for the rest of you. What’s next?”

Henry hasn’t got his voice back yet. He stares up at the shaggy bay beasts that will carry them away, and at the treetops clustered over them all, as if a too-hard touch to this dream would shatter everything like a mirror. Morning ekes down from hills that will eventually rise into oyster bluffs and curl around Rattay as a snake ‘round its perfect silk egg. And beyond even that, Neuhof, where the burnt clover is now flowering and the winter mares are ready to foal again.

“What’s next,” Siskin announces, and—because it could be no other way—breaks the first smile among them. It devours his cherub face and even though the whites of his eyes are not quite as bushytailed as they’d seemed two months ago, they are still starving for all the thrills pretty metals can buy. “Is selling this fucking silver, buying a sword and a less humiliating horse, and getting the hell out of Bohemia like Sigismund’s lighting fires under my arse. How do you say _‘Go fuck yourself’_ in German, anyway?”

Henry can’t seem to get up from the grass. His own words sound like they’re ringing in from a faraway bell. “Lucas studies languages.”

“Oh? Speak Deutscher at all?”

“I do,” he agrees, charily, bedraggled as a puppy someone almost bucket-drowned. The pebbly shore clearly hurts Lucas’s heels and there’s such obvious buzzing in the boy’s head, he must think he’s hallucinating all of this, too. “And Polish, and Sorb, and French. And a little—”

“Enough, enough! I’m persuaded.” Siskin tosses a fat silver fork; Lucas traps it against his stomach, a relic so clean that it looks next-to-holy in the wake of the water. “You’re hired. Buy yourself some clothes on the road. The _road—_! Have you louts even seen dirt so pretty? What about you, Karl? Up for charming the Brunswick beauties with us? Learn some better vocabulary than _sanctorum, peccatorum_?”

The road past the scraggly woodlands darts two directions like an easier river. It is nothing spectacular, upkept in predictable stretches and laden with tangly thornbush. Yet he wonders if it was always so vibrant, like copper. He wonders if the dust beneath his nails and the itch inside his nose will come to bother him again, one day, like none of this was anything but a bad season and a fever. He says:

“No, not me. I have unfinished business to find my way back to, I hope.”

They bid Karl-who-was-Gregor goodbye right in the color of that road, under new daylight, two-to-a-draft dray without saddle. Siskin embraces him and slips a fruit knife into his pocket. He tells his once-brother to ride to Pardubice and call on Old Smil Flashka, to upturn the flower pots and snatch the crystal from the chandeliers. He laughs that they might have been good monks, except for all the sneaking and stealing. As for Lucas—he tells Karl nothing of consequence, cannot stumble his washed-blank mind onto anything to say. He will curse him, perhaps, in the lean nights ahead. But not always, Henry knows. He knows there will come a time the boy who won’t speak looks around and sees there are worse dooms in the world than losing whoever you used to be.

“How do you say _farewell,_ ” Siskin wonders, pulling Lucas onto the annoyed animal behind him by the middle of his arm; long ears twitch nervously; Lucas squints as he struggles up, as though certain it must be a joke.

“Um. _Auf Wiedersehen_?”

“Auf Wiedersehen, you imbeciles! Hee-ya!” cries the silver-thief, and like they are nobody’s sons, he heels his steed in its belly to ride off. The clouds that rise in the road behind them are fleeting and bright.

Henry watches them go until he can watch no more.

Then he turns back to Pavel—the hamstring-splitter, poison-healer—who sits among sessile oaks, peaceful with tiredness, and makes friends with his horse.

“Who are you,” Pavel asks. The man who was Antonius looks now for all the world like a brown wolf resting placidly in its forest, and even dripping river water, face sharpened with brambles and the truth, it isn’t unlike meeting him over again. “Really?”

For a moment, he’s not sure he’ll tell. There is a part of Henry that does not want a man capable of what he has seen on the worst days of his life to know anything true about him. But he has killed men and almost-men, too; he knows the thickness of runaway fires, how they strangle the sky and blind you; he knows the gentleness of placing a hand over an old workhorse’s whiskery nose.

“My name’s Henry,” he says. “I’m Sir Radzig Kobyla’s man.”

Pavel’s palm slips off the horse muzzle. He lets free a bemused snort of air, casts an irreverent and nervous glance to the holy towers behind them. “Shit _._ Lord Kobyla sent knights after _me_?”

Henry looses a snort of his own. “I’m a blacksmith.”

“As much of a knight as I am a priest, then.”

They grin at one another, neither saved nor sacred men, because it seems at this crossroads there is nothing else to do. Pavel stands, a roped gelding in each hand, and extends the prettier one to Henry, who takes it. The stomp and flick of cropped black tails settle like period points at a chapter’s end.

“You’re not about to do something asinine like following me, are you?” he hopes, cringing a touch through his smile. The killer has left his dagger lying in the chapel garden. Without it, he doesn’t seem quite so confident or so sure. “Knock me over the head and drag me back to your lord?”

Henry shakes the question away. He wishes he had today’s wisdom yesterday, and most days before that. Yet he never feels less like a knight and more like a blacksmith—like his father—than he does in this moment, on this path away from more important people, accepting how much he does not know. “No. As far as I can tell it, the man they sent me after is dead.”

Pavel does not say _yes_ or _no_. He looks deep through Henry’s eyes, which will never be as dark as his own, and pats his shoulders with brotherhood that is realer than anything the Benedictines have ever prayed into existence.

“Very well, then.” He promises, “I’ll remember your face.”

And with nothing left to keep him from it—not dogs or gods or bygone names—he mounts the horse, and picks a direction to leave.

“God save you, Sir Henry of Skalitz! _In principio, et nunc, et semper_ ,” he cheers, and runs off the roads, into a meadow rolling towards elsewhere, welcomed among young beech trees.

Henry waits for the sound of hoofbeats to scatter off through the forest. Then he gathers his old and new prayers, and goes on.

 

* * *

 

There are some people who never lose their fear of dark trees. They never grow out of the power that thunder on branches or shadow-dogs in bad dreams keep over their bodies; they will never look beyond the shroud that demarcates all lines where the woods fall into tamed flat land. They won’t dare the forest flowers or secret waters for fear of what else they may find.

It’s easier to dream wood wolves than to meet them. In his dreams, Henry no longer sees wolves of sinew and fur, but loose forms of black smoke running through the fields of Skalitz with teeth, tearing things with shapes and color asunder. And he does not know if he will ever stop dreaming these wolves. He doesn’t know if they can be tricked or studied or prayed away—if one day he will wake up mind-and-body mended, poison vomited out, and never hear their voices growl over the lindens again.

But there are other animals in the forest than wolves.

And there are wolves in the world of rules and order, too.

For all of that. Despite every good thing that is now gone to him—and for all he may one day still mourn, his homes and his loves and his real name, too—the choice isn’t difficult. He would rather risk getting lost in the trees.

 

* * *

 

It is dark over the city of Rattay. By the time Henry returns, the stars themselves are losing their splendor, and it will soon be daybreak again.

He spends his day riding in circles through hinter, too anxious to nap or forage food. Pavel’s houndmasters keep him waiting. When they finally arrive, his stories of blood and pandemonium at the monastery satisfy them; “ _I’ve killed the whole lot¸”_ their false-friend pledges, _“just to be certain, and dumped the corpses far downriver in the worst of the current.”_ The excess of it all makes these dogs grin. At sundown—after they’ve loped back to their bandits’ den up the cliffside, and when Henry is fair sure he’s not being followed—the panic in him subsides like tidewater. He walks his horse east through snarled walnut trees toward home.

It is too late to do anything else. Henry arrives long after the burghers are abed, when only Nightingale roams the streets with his wee-hours whistlesong and a sometimes-smile. He puts the carthorse to rest in Pirkstein’s stable, and thinks fondly of how he’ll greet Pebbles in the morning, once Bernard opens the high castle marshalsea. And, without a word to anyone, he collapses like rolled rocks onto his lumpy bailey bed. He feels he could sleep for two-hundred years.

Hans wakes him in two hours and a half, stamping down the wood stairs one blink after dawn like he always does, bursting through Henry’s rickety door without heed or decorum, planting his every elbow and knee as if by sorcery into every one of the blacksmith’s most vulnerable spots. He wheezes awake under attack, flushing angrily at the sleep denied him, heart speckling gladness—and though there’s only hands and extravagant closeness—and though he, too, is struck dumb with the sear of his own happiness—before anything makes a humble horseradish of sense to Henry's scrambled unjarred brain—everything’s already over, and he is left depleted of the strength to budge his hose either back up or the rest of the way down.

“How did you know I was here?” he mumbles, one eye drifting shut and the other wavering, because he can’t think a long enough thought to remember any of the better things he’d like to say.

Hans may as well be a bright burn with a bronze halo perched over him. His lines all bleed and fizzle gently and it’s hard for Henry to understand how a thing of vim and vigor could make the center of him feel like muted daylight on a church wall, framed by crawling vines with yellow flowers. He feels like a child looking at painted wingtips in a soft hour before there were men holy enough to dictate God’s meaning in making the world, an hour so old that beauty deserved to be loved because there is nothing less natural than to not love it.

“I saw your footprints,” he insists. “Out there in the dirt.”

Henry is still conscious enough to slur, “Liar.”

“It’s the truth. I hunted you down like a bunny in the grass.”

“Leave me alone,” he begs, meaning the opposite, feeling only now the real world and how it is come back to him. The dream of those holy stone walls breaks and Gregor with them, until that name is only some other boy that might have been, far away from here, trapped by the unfair fate of his birth. Perhaps something strange shows on his face, too, for Hans squints down at him thoughtfully, just a moment, and then laughs, dimpled and mean, for no discernable reason. Henry sees his big front teeth in the morning dark and thinks he would crawl inside his skin. He lies there, exhausted, wishing in his sleepiness and relief he could somehow get closer—so close that he would blur partway into the young lord's royal golds and fox reds until you could not pull him wholly apart again. “I’m so tired. Let me sink into the earth.”

Henry wants to sleep, but Hans says he smells like a bag of rotten creekweeds, like some half-dead trout a bear flipped up on the beach. And so he forces him back into those rancid clothes and up out of his straw bed, and he tows him blearily up the castle stairs, through a narrow hallway where a drowsy cook is only just now lighting the ovens, past dewy glass that will be soon flushed with the first slice of real sun, and he nudges him into his chambers with the painfully soft beds and the painted walls, a place of foamy rivers and black stags and rapturous wolves. The young lord sits him unceremoniously in front of the unfinished remains of his morning snack—knifed tart apples and tough smoked meat. Meanwhile, he drags in the wooden tub himself, and then draws it, barreled water swirling close to a cedar fire. Before Henry’s done mindlessly chewing a dry mouthful of leftover venison, Hans strips him and pushes him in, and it’s a mild shock. It’s chilling, clean, nowhere close to hot—and the bedroom window is cracked a bit where they sit high above the rocky bluffs of Rattay, letting in sunbright morning. And even as Henry shivers, Hans is clacking off his hunting spurs and tossing his boots by the door to catch up.

The fire is young, and the water is slow to warm. They have no soap, but Hans sloshes forward to rub fingers messily through the blacksmith’s too-long hair anyway, distressing it. And even poxed with goosepimples and getting his ears mussed, Henry knows he will sleep here, finally, and dream.

“Hal,” Hans says as he sits on his deadly knees in cold bathwater and smacks, the pest, at Henry’s cheek so he doesn’t doze off. “Did you _really_ join the fucking Benedictines?”

Henry gives one chuckle, lashes drooping and all, leveraging the most flourish he can muster. “ _Ora et Labora_.”

“That’s the _craziest_ , frothiest, most fucking preposterous,” Hans swears, laughing in his face, splintering into profanity and mean-spirited giggles, “absolute March hare _maddest_ thing I have _ever_ heard. I'm dead impressed, Henry. I'm having a fucking fit! You must have been the most pathetic monk in the history of monkdom,” he figures, crumbling. “You must have had those old wine-bibbers steaming in their habits. Cussing in their alleluias. ‘ _Heavenly Father, we throw ourselves low onto the earth and beg for your deliverance from this bone-headed peasant—!’_ ”

Henry knows that if he determines to smile, his eyes will slip all the way shut, and once they do, Hans will have to drag him out of the tub and drop him still-damp into bed. He will cover him sloppily with the blanket. He will lay out new clothes from his own wardrobe and leave no instructions about them—or about anything—and he will take up his bow and go out in the sun.

“Well?” the young lord wonders, thumping down beside him. His arm looped around Henry’s neck is a minor warmth in the bathwater, and the closeness of his voice makes each one of those sixty days and fifty-nine nights already feel less real. “What about it? Did you save your soul, or not?”

“Absolutely not. I’m going to burn for certain.”

“You're so sure. Best to stay in the bath, then.”

“That’s just saving the angels a step, is all it is. Cook us both with one lightning bolt—bucket of flames. We’ll wash away,” he jokes, “right down into to Hell.”

Young Lord Capon, of course, does not act like a man afraid of fire. Henry waits for the young lord to boast about all the ways in which he'll rescue him, fish him out, hold him down, tear him free, spare his life, pull him from the darkest depth of deep water. But he does not. He considers an eternity of burning for only a moment, and in his castle under the pine bluffs, leaves Henry a kiss on the head.

They say—the monks, and the people who see the world like them—that the doorway to purgatory is a dark wood. It is a place where even the sun is silent. You might still try, it is said, to escape. You might avoid the maned and mawed animals who would deceive you to stay; you might yet find salvation; you might find your way out of the wilds. But here there are no certain fates, and nothing is promised. You might lose yourself forever to the sanctum of trees.

When we do, Hans says. I’ll look for you.

That’s not so bad, he thinks. Not all the wolves in the trees are unkind.


End file.
